Successful Meetings - December 2009 - 22

PLANNER’S WORKSHOP visionaries Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity, is still surfing the web for inspiration, innovation, and even love A Soaring Success By Andrea Doyle andrea.doyle@nielsen.com I nnovation is more important than ever as the country emerges from the “great recession,” says 61-yearold Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.com and chairman of Kayak.com. “A lot of people confuse innovation with invention. According to Wikipedia, invention is the art of creating something new. Innovation is taking a good idea and putting it to work,” he says. That’s exactly what Jones did when he created a web site through which consumers could check airfares, a first in the world of the Internet that was still in its infancy. His brainchild went on to become Travelocity, a national brand with more than 40 million members, 1,200 employees, and $5 billion in travel bookings at the time he left. Today, the company is even bigger. Operating at full throttle: Jones with a DC-10 engine Inside Operator He calls himself an “intrapreneur,” as he started Travelocity in 1996 as a department inside multi-billion dollar Sabre Holdings, part of American Airlines. Intrapreneurs face different challenges than entrepreneurs, he explains. Competitors are as likely to be internal as external. In this world, who you report to can be as important as building a brand is to the entrepreneur. “Usually new ideas are like a little flame on a candle. They’re kind of easy to blow out,” he says. Fortunately for Jones, that didn’t happen in his depart- ment. Instead, the flame of innovation was ignited and he created his own culture to foster it. “It was more like baseball than the Olympics,” he explains. “My employees had a lot of chances at bat. Think about it: Great baseball players strike out 70 percent of the time, but with the Olympics, you only get one chance every four years. I created a culture where you could experiment, where I allowed failure. I tried to be their coach. A coach doesn’t just throw people off a team. He trains them to be better and welds them into a good team.” Jones has since evolved from coaching his own department to coaching the employees of other companies; he is a sought-after speaker who makes about 30 speeches a year focusing on innovation and leadership. He is also a managing principal of Essential Ideas, a consultancy he co-founded to help companies in their transition to the digital economy. He serves on the I SM I December 2009 I SuccessfulMeetings.com

http://www.Travelocity.com http://www.Kayak.com http://www.SuccessfulMeetings.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Successful Meetings - December 2009

Successful Meetings - December 2009
Contents
Editor's Letter
World Travel Market: Short-Term Outlook Still Bleak, Long-Term Still Bright
Food & Beverage
Incentive Insights
Personal Success
Management Matters
Visionaries
Trade Show Report
Sales & Marketing Meetings

Successful Meetings - December 2009