business

Just two weeks after Roy Bostock succeeded Gary Wilson as chairman of the Northwest Airlines board in June, pilots union leaders gave the airline's executives a vote of no confidence.

A few days after that action, Bostock, a 38-year advertising agency veteran, watched Northwest's operations and national reputation deteriorate as the carrier canceled hundreds of flights because of a pilot staffing shortage.

In early July, the flight attendants called on CEO Doug Steenland to resign, saying he had mismanaged the airline.

Bostock, a relative newcomer to the Northwest political scene, knows that the airline's contentious labor relations are its biggest liability. In a wide-ranging interview with the Star Tribune last week, Bostock cast himself in the role of a healer.

He thinks that it is "inane" for a company to have such poor labor relations, and he argues that Northwest management and labor must work as a well-functioning team if they want to have high-quality customer service.

He's been dissecting the airline's problems since he joined the board in 2005.

Now he's in a position to marshal significant change. He became the 12-member board's chairman after the airline exited bankruptcy on May 31.

"There simply is no reason in my mind for the kind of confrontational relationship that developed between Northwest and its unions," Bostock said. Better treatment for Northwest employees and customers is at the top of Bostock's priority list.

Bostock, quarterback of the state champion Edina High School football team in 1957, is a candid businessman who recognizes that a major culture change at Northwest will take more than rhetoric.

"There has been an adversarial relationship between management and unions, and even to some extent board versus management. That to me has got to go away," Bostock said. "We need to develop an attitude and behavior patterns to say, 'You know what? We are in this thing together.'"

Bostock, 66, and Wilson both earned undergraduate degrees from Duke University, both serve on the Yahoo Inc. board of directors and both have buildings that bear their names at Duke.

But Bostock is free of the political baggage that Wilson accumulated during his tenure at the airline. Many members of Northwest's veteran workforce have been critical of Wilson since he led a leveraged buyout of the airline in 1989 with California financier Al Checchi. In recent times, employees were angered after Wilson sold more than $21 million worth of Northwest stock in the months leading up to Northwest's 2005 bankruptcy filing.

Wilson declined to do media interviews and did not seek out Northwest employees to solicit their opinions about the company. Bostock is charting a much different course.

He plans to hold meetings with employees. "Doug [Steenland] is the leader of this company. I want to make that absolutely clear," said Bostock. But the chairman emphasized that it's also valuable for him to hear directly from Northwest employees.

"I want these folks to know that this board of directors cares about them and is hell-bent on changing this culture and changing the attitudes in this company to make it more productive for everyone," he said.

Bostock also believes that Northwest needs to improve its outreach to its customers.

"I come from the world of consumer-packaged goods and marketing and advertising," Bostock said, and he's always worked with companies that have "their own survey techniques and tools to measure how well they are doing with their customers."

At Northwest, he said, he thinks there's too much reliance on evaluating operations by looking at Department of Transportation statistics, which include industry comparisons on measures such as on-time flight performance and mishandled baggage.