CEO survives challenging take-off
According to the Age, as Bruce Buchanan walks into his Bourke Street office today and into his first day as Jetstar chief executive, the 35-year-old is unfazed about the job ahead.
When he reveals that he is most likely to listen to hip hop, rapper Jay Z and euro lounge music on his way to work, it strikes you that he is still relatively young to be thrust into such a high-profile role.
But as Mr Buchanan explains in his first interview since being awarded the top job, maturity is something that was forced on him quite young.
Much of the man he is today he credits to the traumatic experience of losing his mother Linda to leukaemia when he was a teenager, after a 3½-year battle, before her 40th birthday and on her son’s 17th, she succumbed to cancer, leaving Mr Buchanan to finish his final two years at school on his own.
“It is probably one of the reasons that I matured younger,” he said.
“My sister, who is six years younger then me, went to live with my dad in Sydney.”
“When you are given complete freedom at a very young age, you do either float or sink.”
“Going to a public school you see a lot of people sink, but if you get through that and rise to the challenge, then it kind of sets you up for the rest of your life.”
Mr Buchanan persevered and received entry into civil engineering at the University of NSW.
“It was quite controversial because my parents and grandfather did chemical engineering, so I was going against family tradition,” he said.
After a stint running his own IT consulting company, he got an offer to work with the Boston Consulting Group, where he had his first contact with Qantas.
“During the summer of 1998-99, I worked for Qantas’ in-flight catering, which was interesting.” “I worked on the snap-fresh product.” “That was my introduction to Qantas,” he said.
His predecessor, Alan Joyce, describes Mr Buchanan as one of the “founding fathers” of Jetstar, having worked for Qantas’ budget offshoot since its launch in 2004.
Avoiding the temptation to make an immediate mark on the company, Mr Buchanan says it will be business as usual at Jetstar. “Alan Joyce’s Jetstar I always thought of as something that I was intricately involved in and I think it will be exactly the same,” he said.
Mr Buchanan admits, though, that he hopes there will be no place that Jetstar doesn’t fly by the end of his tenure.
“We have had to make a lot of hard decisions and we will continue to.” “But Jetstar’s future is exciting as we continue to grow.”
John Alwyn-Jones
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