Alaska Air Group, Inc. management files June 23, 2008 US SEC 8K with final voting tally (click here)
August 19, 2008
Board Directors Mark Hamilton and Jesse Knight
Alaska Air Group, Inc.
PO Box 68947
Seattle, WA 98168
Via: FAX (206) 392-5807 and email keith.loveless@alaskaair.com
Dear Mssrs. Hamilton and Knight:
I appreciate General Hamilton's invitation to meet on September 10, 2008 with Richard Foley and myself. We are currently in discussions with AAG management to make it economical and practical time wise to attend the meeting in SEA.
If we are unable to attend, I wanted to provide this letter to you which we ask you share with the full board. It lays out some of our thinking on how our companies might be turned in new directions to help stem rising fixed costs while at the same time growing income.
Our current corporate/worker union institutions are obsolete and unsustainable. Fundamental changes are unavoidable. For starters, our current stockholders aren't really true investors. If we properly restructured, they could bring in new month-to-month capital to help fund our business. Their option or right to demand the sale of our companies to garner a small return needs to be challenged with new thinking. Failure to embrace proactive thinking combined with the current business reality puts a thumb on the scale favoring hostile takeover.
Workers and customers are active wealth creators, but hold little or no voting or governing power. If the company is sold, we lose jobs and consumption options to access and utilize a reliable, corporate air transportation system. This arrangement is imbalanced and undermines loyalty and trust from people putting real time and effort into making our companies successful. These people deserve a commensurate reward and a better deal.
PARTNERSHIPS
Partnering is a key word that describes emerging new-millennium corporations and limited liability companies. This is most evident in raising capital, which can take the form of capital partners, versus stockholders. Once past the IPO stage, stockholders in a joint stock corporation are unproductive, especially when compared to the power they command in the company. (click here to read complete letter)
Gregory the Great pointed out
that "love itself is knowing" (amor ipse notitia est)
and later William of St. Thierry varied this saying slightly and
deepening the thought appreciably, by writing that "love itself
is understanding" (amor ipse intellectus est). Love alone
allows us to know another. Only love permits us truly to understand
the other as a unique person, yet acknowledge that we're all One
in our common humanity. [A novelist's more modern insight: "It
is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential
is invisible to the eye." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French
flyer, philosopher and writer]
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