Eric Brinker

Director, Jet Blue Airways

Let’s start with your job, your day-to-day activities, and your title.

I’m the director of brand management and customer experience here at Jet Blue. I look after not only the brand of Jet Blue, kind of the keeper of the brand, and how it’s used and how we partner with other people to leverage our brand, but I also look after our product development efforts where we look to bring new partners to work with Jet Blue. As part of that I also look after our on-board experience. So everything that happens to you when you get on the Jet Blue flight from what kind of napkin we give you to the way our flight attendants look. And with that comes a lot of responsibility to manage those programs so that we can provide the best customer experience.

Did you know growing up that you wanted to work in this type of job?

Growing up I, I always was fascinated with transportation. As a little kid I used to be fascinated with the chair lifts at ski resorts. I used to actually build a string in my room of fake chairlifts all around my room and people were like what is this? Even in high school and college, I didn’t even really think that was a real opportunity. I just was fascinated by it but I never knew that it could actually be a career. When I started reading about Jet Blue and the founding of Jet Blue, I became just absolutely fascinated with the company and just had to figure out how I could get in to work here. And I forced myself to get to know the people who were behind it and get them to hear some of the ideas I had, and I found that because I have such an interest in it it really helped me to be excited and show my excitement, and that really led to my career in this industry.

Going back to your education, what were the steps that you took? How did you find out

It started off by really being pulled out of class to be tutored. So during the day there were, as I was going through school, there were less and less classes I was going to. And fortunately my parents were able to provide tutors for me, but that wasn’t an ideal situation. Because I’m in a school where I’m one of the only kids that has dyslexia, and I’m constantly being pulled out to be tutored separately. And it got to the point in fifth or sixth grade where it was just impossible. I was just constantly being kind of pulled out of class being tutored, during school, after school, and it just wasn’t working. And that’s when we said you know we have to look for something else. And with that I was very fortunate to have a guidance counselor that had known about the Landmark School in Boston.

Landmark works mostly with students with language-based disabilities?

What I found was that I was around people I didn’t have to explain myself to anymore. I didn’t have to explain who I was and the biggest thing that Landmark started to do from day one is build my confidence. Literally four months into being at Landmark my reading comprehension went from about a fourth grade level, almost up to grade level, and by the end of the year I was exceeding my grade level in reading comprehension. So all of a sudden it just started to take off and so much of it, I um, credit to the confidence that the school builds in people. It teaches kids that it’s okay to be who they are, and take risks and challenge them.

When you face challenges every day do you still go back to what you learned at Landmark?

You never, these challenges never go away. But what you do is you learn to compensate from them. You learn, and you become aware of your challenges. You become a person who understands what your strengths are, but you then have the ability to know, if I’m not strong at this then I need to reach out to this person who’s going to help me. And you know because of the confidence you now have, that it’s okay that you’re not strong at everything, because you know that what you’re good at is what you’re good at.

Within your branding team, how much are you involved in the process, how do ideas get implemented?

Well there’s a bunch of ways that ideas get implemented, but one of the things we try to do is we try to create a really open forum for people to be able to communicate openly. So my team has the opportunity to throw out ideas at any point and the reason they get inspiration for doing that is that frankly I’m doing that. I’m constantly throwing ideas out to my leadership, to our CEO, or to anyone who will listen.

This video is for high school and college students. What do you think it takes to succeed in this kind of environment?

It’s really hard to get sometimes in, to some of these organizations that are growing or are popular or that you hear about, and what I think is really critical is, not only do you have to have put forth a really good effort in school and have worked hard, but you need to have some secondary experience. An internship. Internships. Multiple internships. Every year that you can possibly have an internship. You need to have summer jobs. You need to, because the people who are working on my team right now are almost all people that have had internships at Jet Blue.

Do you find your job fulfilling?

Very. It’s very exciting; it’s an opportunity to be a part of building something. There’s not a day that goes by that I walk through this company that I don’t see something that either myself or someone on my team has either led or had their hands on. It feels really good to be part of an organization where you along with almost all your colleagues can look and say I did that, I built that, I had some impact on that, and it really, you know, builds a sense of ownership.