Like him or loathe him, Michael O'Leary is crucial to Ryanair, writes Siobhán Creaton, Finance Correspondent, in an edited extract from her new book.
1995 - One year after O'Leary takes the helm at Ryanair:
One person suggested that Ryanair doesn't have a senior management team but one that 'recognises the Führer'. Staff who have been on the receiving end of one of the chief executive's ferocious verbal assaults - known within Ryanair as O'Leary 'hate beams' - are left shattered. When problems are raised he will simply bark at the person bearing the bad news to 'fix it'. One of the Ryanair crew said you always had to be careful about what you said to O'Leary. 'If you raised a problem, there had better be a problem and you had better have a start, middle and solution to that issue. You didn't start something and expect him to fix it.'
His five lieutenants came in the direct line of fire every Monday morning. The meetings would start at 8.30 sharp and, just like Tony Ryan at GPA, O'Leary would spend an hour goading Tim Jeans, Howard Millar, Brian Taylor, Maurice O'Connor and Conor McCarthy to achieve the most stretching targets possible over the following days.
'Nobody missed them. There would be five or six of us. People would be savaged,' Jeans recalled.
They came to be known as the 'spin the bottle' meetings, with O'Leary randomly selecting his victim.
Those who managed to escape would sigh with relief, one source said. 'If you argued your point you would get your head kicked in. It was bizarre. He would be personally insulting and would be roaring and shouting. He was very frustrated because he could always see the full picture and was impatient when this wasn't obvious to others. Nine out of ten times he was right.' One person suggested that O'Leary, a consummate workaholic, felt that as they had had the weekend off they needed a 'kick up the backside' to get back to work on Monday. 'He would view a weekend off as being lazy,' the source explained.
O'Leary's aggressive management style increasingly began to rub off on others. 'More and more people began to get impatient, and shout and roar at staff when really they shouldn't,' one employee remarked. The management team was organised around making Ryanair an efficient airline, making sure that flights arrived and departed on time. 'He was trying to run an on-time, efficient organisation.
That was his number one priority. That never altered,' said Jeans. O'Leary would send Jeans and Bernard Berger, who was in charge of route development, to negotiate deals with new airports. 'He would of course issue instructions on what we were to look for and get and wouldn't spare us when we returned with less than that,' Jeans recalled. 'His language would be at its most choice on those occasions. But when push came to shove though he was prepared to come out and back you up, do the publicity for the launch. This was a good example of where the team played to their individual strengths.
We were very focused.' 'Once he trusts you, you can do what you want. The biggest sin in Ryanair is to do nothing. If you did something wrong you would get a bollocking, but if you did it again, God help you!' Conor McCarthy said that if your head was on the line at one of the Monday morning meetings you could expect to get no support from the others. 'If you jumped in to help someone else O'Leary would tell you to mind your own business. He wouldn't like it.' One source said that the chief executive was a great motivator, although his behaviour could be appalling. 'He is aggressive, a bully and worse but he has a great ability to motivate people. The longer people stay the more cynical they get. People have a huge ability to take their medicine. He gets a lot out of people. He leads. His attitude is that if you won't do your job then he will do it.' It was a small and lean organisation and there was little office politicking played out at the upper echelons, mainly because it was clear that no one was going to get O'Leary's job. 'Loyalty is the most important thing as far as Michael is concerned,' the source added. 'He is a control freak.'
1998 - Fifty baggage handlers seek SIPTU's help to discuss their pay levels with Ryanair. Ryanair refuses to deal with the union. The baggage handlers supported by SIPTU decide to stage a series of one hour stoppages:
On Friday 9 January, 1998, the day of the threatened strike, O'Leary arrived at the airport before the baggage-handlers' first shift began at 6 a.m., still not sure whether they would down tools. When it became clear that the stoppages were going to happen, some thought he looked physically ill. 'That was the first time I saw him nearly shit himself,' one source said. 'Personnel issues were not his best point. It scares the life out of him. He felt the situation was out of his control. Someone else had targeted his style and there was nothing he could do.' Others said he hid the stress remarkably well as he walked down to meet the seventeen baggage-handlers due to start their shift that morning. For the next hour he tried a variety of colourful language, threats and promises to try to prevent the stoppage. (Later that day one of the baggage-handlers expressed shock as the language and abuse they had been subjected to. 'Even his tone was bad for a chief executive,' he told a reporter.) Amongst other things he offered to pay them for the full day, even if they stopped work, provided they stayed on the premises and did not go down to the union office.
But the group wasn't swayed, and they staged their series of one-hour stoppages in the morning and afternoon as planned.
Ryanair played down the impact of the industrial action and insisted to the media that no flights had been cancelled. SIPTU officials and some baggage handlers began to check Ryanair's timetable of flights to discover that in fact there had been cancellations, but none had been displayed on the passenger information monitors around the airport. Paul O'Sullivan - then SIPTU's official at Dublin airport - got his hands on a memo that had been circulated to Aer Rianta detailing the flights that had to be cancelled. 'It was given to me on condition that I would not disclose its contents,' he explained.
'One thing I do regret was that I had that document in my hand yet at the same time Ryanair was telling journalists that no flights had been cancelled. I maintained the confidence of the person who gave me that document all of the way through and I probably shouldn't have.' In the war of words that erupted over the next two weeks Ryanair claimed that 95 per cent of its staff were operating normally, while SIPTU insisted that 134 flights listed in the airline's winter schedule had not operated during the stoppage periods. The number of people participating in the dispute became a hotly debated issue.
O'Sullivan claimed that O'Leary was consistently wrong about the number of people engaged in the dispute. 'He kept saying that there were less than twenty when in fact it was fifty. To disprove that we brought everyone involved in the dispute into the Dail Eireann for a photo call. It was only after that happened that he stopped making that claim,' O'Sullivan said.
And all the while the stoppages continued. They were sporadic and had begun to lengthen to two and three hours on some days but the baggage-handlers always returned to work. When they arrived back O'Leary would frequently be waiting to vent his spleen at them. One, who was from Ballymun, the nearby working-class Dublin suburb, found himself in O'Leary's firing line as he led the return to the baggage hall. As work resumed, one source recalled O'Leary began shouting at him: 'Why would I be talking to some scumbag like you from Ballymun? What do you know about anything?' The young baggage-handler was totally unfazed by the chief executive's outburst and is remembered for his curt response. 'I may not have gone to any posh school like you,' he replied, 'but if I did I wouldn't let anybody call me Ducksie [O'Leary's nickname at Clongowes Wood].'
2002 - The European Commission investigates whether the money given to Ryanair to establish its first European base at Belgium's Chareleroi Airport in 2001 amounted to illegal state aid. In February 2004 it ruled this to have been the case:
Ryanair's biggest fear during the European Commission investigation was whether the Commission would force it to renegotiate the deals it had with other publicly owned airports, which amounted to about 20 per cent of those it used across Europe. If all of these deals became more expensive then Ryanair's costs would rise. David Bonderman and some of the airline's other directors, such as the former European Commissioner Ray MacSharry, had fully grasped the potential impact of an adverse ruling from Brussels and had been trying to restrain O'Leary from hurling insults at these influential politicians. One source familiar with the case said O'Leary had been told to 'maintain radio silence' as the Commission progressed towards a decision. 'If things had gone badly against the airline it could have taken a big hit,' the source added. 'It was potentially very bad news and could have done serious and irreparable damage to Ryanair. O'Leary is a very difficult character. He is impetuous and doesn't easily take advice. The board was trying to keep him under control with Bonderman, MacSharry and James Osborne attempting to sit on him. He was told to "shut his mouth" and not to upset anyone but of course there was the odd squeak.' One of those 'squeaks' upset Belgian commissioner Philippe Busquin, who finally snapped and declared that O'Leary was 'terribly irritating and irritates commissioners'.
[Ryanair appealed the Commission ruling this week]
O'Leary:
Some sources at Ryanair believe that if O'Leary left the airline would collapse. 'When he is on holidays or is not there you can tell. Ryanair is driven from the top down and this doesn't happen when he's not there. He runs the place by kicking people in the head.
At the same time he has a finger in every pie. He has the pulse of the place.' In terms of running the business, his single greatest skill is driving costs down. 'This is the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up in the morning,' an associate explained. He has banned post-it notes and highlighter pens and told staff to steal biros to save money. 'I tell the staff not to buy them. Just to pick them up from hotels, legal offices, wherever. That's what I do,' he explained.
He has made a vast fortune from Ryanair. His shareholding in the airline alone is worth around \€190 million and he has taken more than \€150 million out of the company through share sales over the years. Some who know him suggest his current wealth far exceeds this figure, with some suggesting he could have assets worth more than \€500 million. He says money is important when you are trying to make the first million, ten million, or even the first fifty million.
'After that it doesn't so much matter. But if you take it all away tomorrow, I will be really pissed off.' He claims to puts his money in the Post Office but is known to have invested in properties in Britain and the United States and to hold a substantial share portfolio.
After many years of hard work and devotion to the airline, Ryanair's forty-three-year old chief executive appears to have found happiness in his personal life. 'I was rude, worked too hard, I am probably a bit offensive; I am certainly not charming.
I don't do nightclubs. I was too busy working through my thirties to meet someone. I got very lucky, met someone lovely. I couldn't be happier.' His wedding to Anita Farrell was a lavish affair hosted at his Mullingar home in 2003. Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy attended, along with Tony Ryan and his family and David Bonderman, who flew in from the US for the occasion. People who have come into contact with O'Leary said he can be 'very nice' and 'great company', though some who know him suggest he doesn't have any friends. One said, 'I like him but I keep my distance.' He doesn't cultivate relationships within Ryanair and is close to few people beyond his family. Others say that he can be fatherly and loves to be asked for advice.
His favourite greeting is 'Howya lad'. When inquiring about how certain ideas and initiatives might play with Ryanair's female staff, he has been heard to ask, 'What do the dollies think?', though staff said this was never said in a disrespectful way.