"There was magic here," says Donald Welsh. "It was a Camelot. I mean pilots would come in on their days off and wash airplanes. Everybody was there for the cause. There was no distinction between management and employees." Not only has growth "robbed" Horizon of its magic, Welsh says, but he has also come to question his relevance as a manager.
Welsh and Maul were not alone in such thoughts. According to most accounts, management's frustration reached a peak in early October 1985, when senior managers rented a suite at an airport motel for a three-hour meeting, to which Kuolt was not invited. "It was a lot of emotion and frustration coming to a head," William Ayer recalls. "People just felt they needed to get away from Milt and talk about what was going on. My contribution was [to point out] that Milt is the way he is, and he's always going to be that way, and we either ought to figure out how we're going to cope with it or go do something else for a living."
Ayer says that, as a result of the meeting, managers have begun to communicate with one another more effectively. Its primary accomplishment, however, lay in the affirmation of solidarity, an understanding that "we're all in the same boat." Meanwhile, the managers are hoping that Kuolt will change enough to bring in a strong chief operating officer, who would relieve him of the day-to-day details with which he is obviously uncomfortable. Failing that, they are prepared for the possibility that Horizon might get a new COO another way -- through acquisition by a larger airline.
Not that they question Kuolt's value to the company. "The whole irony of the thing is that we wouldn't be where we are now if it weren't for Milt and his style," says Ayer. "I mean the growth and the good things that have happened to this company. His style was completely appropriate for the first two or three years, but now [we need a] a different style, a more traditional organizational style of managing a going concern. We're no longer this entrepreneurial deal, flailing around and growing and trying to find itself. We're a major company that needs to be managed."
It's such a goddamn challenge," Kuolt is saying as we drive to a late dinner in Seattle. "We're a teenager trying to be an adult, that's what we are." But help is on the way, he says. Yes, even as we speak, he says, he has plans to add experienced people to his management team. Granted, it didn't work out the last time, but now the company's "personality is stronger," Kuolt says. "They won't be so tempted to come in and say, 'Well, this is the way we did it at TWA.' I never gave a shit how they did it at TWA anyway." then, too, he says, he is "more willing to accept help."
(That's true, says William Peare, the former Thousand Trails COO who recently joined Horizon with a broadly defined marketing assignment. "I'd guess that Horizon today is basically where Trails was in 1981. But here, Milt is confronting issues, which he wouldn't do at Trails. At Trails he'd say, 'I just want out.' He couldn't see light at the end of the tunnel. Here he's willing to try ways to make himself more comfortable.")
Yes, says Kuolt, he's been thinking a lot recently about the similarities between his situation at Horizon and the situation at Thousand Trails before he left. But there is one major difference, he explains. "When I left Trails, I felt that we had built an excellent company, the best in the country, primed beautifully to move to its next level of accomplishment. It's very different with this airline. Here we are about the same size as Trails was, but I do not feel the same way about it as I did about Trails.This company is not anywhere near the best airline of its size. I think we've got all the ingredients, but I have not been able to bring the whole thing together yet. I'm going to bring in outside talent to address these things. When I let go at Trails, I brought in somebody who I thought was better than myself to run the company. I don't feel I've got that person yet, here at Horizon."
"What will happen when you find that person?" I ask.
"When I find that person," Kuolt says, "I guarantee you, he'll run the company."
"And what will you do then?" I ask.
The answer to that question has to wait for a plateful of enchiladas. We are having dinner at the Azteca restaurant. Jose "Pepe" Ramos, the owner and a friend of Kuolt's, is sitting with us. Kuolt has been complaining that he doesn't take enough time away from business. He says that the further away he gets geographically, the more relaxed he feels. Ramos laughs. He says that, this summer, he took Kuolt to Cuautla, the village where he was born in Mexico, which is pretty far away from just about everything. But it hadn't helped Kuolt relax. Kuolt, he says, had tied up the only two phones in the village, trying to reach Horizon.
"Well," says Kuolt, "don't you worry, Pepe. Maybe in a year or so, there will be a chance for me to relax."
"Oh, really," Ramos says, "and where are you going to do that?"
"At Elk Horn," Kuolt says. "Maybe I'll be spending a lot more time at Elk Horn."
And it occurred to me then that maybe Koult had discovered a cure for the Complex after all. In his own roundabout way, he seemed to be saying that there are some people in this world meant to start things and then move on to start something else, and that the most they can do in between is to find their own replacement.
At least, I think that's what he was saying. The ways of Milt Kuolt and his Complex are sometimes hard to figure.
