American Airlines Responds To Facebook Pressure To Find Passenger’s Cat Lost …

(Jack) American Airlines is scrambling to show the public that employees are working hard to find a cat they lost at JFK… after the kitty’s distraught owner launched a social media campaign. Last Thursday Karen Pascoe and her two cats went to JFK for a flight to San Fransisco, where Pascoe was relocating for a new job. After clearing security, she bid goodbye to her two pets as the American Airlines handler was putting the plastic ties around the kennel door. But before boarding her flight, she got a call that one of her cats was missing. On the Facebook page Jack The Cat is Lost in AA Baggage at JFK, she writes (in the third person):

[Karen] began working with Valerie Latty from Customer Service who took me to inbound baggage claim where Jack was lost. Inbound baggage claim is a HUGE area… and Jack was nowhere to be seen. After checking for over an hour (missing flight 177 and being re-booked onto flight 17), she boarded the later flight, assured that they would call her as soon as Jack was found.

Karen was given the following number to contact American Airlines at Central Baggage Service: 972-425-6565. She has left several messages and has not yet been contacted by anyone in that office. She was also told by Valerie Latty that she would receive a proactive call from Customer Service on Friday.

For three days, she heard nothing, and repeated calls to her contacts in Customer Service and the baggage claim area went unanswered. When she finally got someone on the phone, she was told they “had not yet been able to get humane traps.” The manager also told Pascoe that “the last time this happened, it took about a month to find the cat.” Increasingly desperate, she started the Twitter hashtag #findjackthecat and the Facebook page, which has 1,400 likes. This got American Airlines’ attention, and the airline now has a statement about the search for Jack front and center on its Facebook page:

We repeat our apologies for the upset caused by this situation, and wanted to share an update in our efforts to find Jack:

* American has offered Jack’s owner, Karen, a flight to New York to personally visit the JFK operation and help assist with search efforts.
* American has consulted with the Mayor’s Alliance Society for NYC to set up Have-A-Heart humane traps that are being placed throughout the area.
* Food and water has been placed around the operation since Thursday.
* If Jack feels comfortable returning to his kennel, we have placed food and water inside as well.
* Employees, including the American Airlines Managing Director in JFK, have walked the entire operation in search.
* All airside equipment, such as bag carts are being inspected.
* The Port Authority of New York has been contacted with information and posters. They are fully cooperating in the search and distributing posters to other businesses on the airport property.
* AA has placed posters in employee break-rooms, on the ramp, and throughout our JFK facility.
* An alert is being placed on electronic bulletin boards visible to all employees from all departments.
* “Vet Port” has been alerted and is supporting the effort. Vet Port is a veterinary service used by airlines and business local to the airport property where a lost pet would be turned in.
* Access from the airside ramp area leading into the terminal building are being inspected and monitored.

We will continue searching, and as soon as we have any more information, we will share it with the community.

Most commenters on the AA Facebook wall have reacted scornfully to the airline’s belated damage control. “Glad that finally AA is doing something to find the poor cat, although sad that it took media coverage for them to finally react,” writes Lyda Zambrano. “In 2004 AA left my cat stranded for hours at the Miami airport and nobody noticed that he was still in the luggage area instead of inside the plane to Dallas. I spent 5 hours on the phone trying to locate him and finally they realize that they have left my cat behind. That was the last time I flew with AA now I only fly my cat with Continental. All these issues could have been avoided if AA would allow pets in the cabin.”

We reached out to Pascoe to see if she would take American Airlines up on the offer to come search for Jack, whom she rescued from the NYCACC several years ago. We’ll update as we know more! [Via The NY Observer]

Share and Enjoy

Getting a grip on power: 10 tips for a successful career

Ever since Fortune, in 1998, started ranking the top women in business (yes, we were first), I’ve been asking the stars of the Most Powerful Women list how they reached the top and how they stay there. One month away from revealing our 2011 MPW rankings, now seems a good time to share some of their best career tips. Here is my Top 10:

1. Don’t plan your career. Most of the women on the Fortune MPW list, starting with PepsiCo (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi, No. 1 in the rankings since 2006, had no clear career map when they graduated college or business school. Rather, they stayed flexible and open to the possibilities.

2. Forget the ladder; climb the jungle gym. What good is a ladder when the world is changing so fast and unpredictably–and who knows what tomorrow’s ideal job will be? Think of your career as a jungle gym, sharpen your peripheral vision, and look for opportunities all around.

3. Worry about the job you’re in. “If you don’t do that one well, you’ll never get the next one,” says Jan Fields, who started out cooking French fries at McDonald’s (MCD) and rose to U.S. President. While it’s important to envision some ultimate goal, says Fields, “you have to focus on what you have right now, or that long-term opportunity won’t come.”

4. Follow your compass, not your clock. Avon Products (AVP) CEO Andrea Jung lives by this advice, ever since she got passed over the first time around, for the CEO job. Former Time Inc. (TWX) CEO Ann Moore, on the Avon board at the time, gave Jung this advice. It’s good that Jung stayed. In the CEO role since 1999, she’s now the longest-serving female chief in the Fortune 500, and she’s on the Apple (AAPL) and General Electric (GE) boards.

5. Take risks. Google (GOOG) VP Marissa Mayer had a slew of job offers from well-known companies in 1999 when she was coming out of Stanford University with a Masters in Computer Science. She chose Google, then a brand new startup, because, she says,  “I wanted to work for smart people, and I wanted to do things I wasn’t ready to do.”

6. Be yourself. When Ursula Burns learned that she was going to be named CEO of Xerox (XRX), she knew that one of the easiest ways to succeed would be to act like her popular predecessor, who brought the company back from near-bankruptcy. “You can’t try to be me,” Burns recalls Mulcahy telling her. Burns says this is one of her rules today: “You can be somebody else and follow all your life, but you cannot be somebody else and lead.”

7. Don’t balance. Juggle. “Stop believing in balance,” says Anne Sweeney, who has raised two children including an autistic son while overseeing Disney’s (DIS) Media Networks. She calls balance “the B word because it just doesn’t exist.” On days when you can’t get it all done, “the best thing you can do is say, ‘You know what? I gave it my best and I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and try again. She adds, “There are days when it falls into place, but chances are, it happened because you had a lot of smart people that you work with who were knocking it out of the park.”

8. Give thanks. While, this may sound Polyannish, the people who make it to the top and stay there–especially women, who are judged within a narrower band of acceptable behavior than men tend to be–give out more appreciation than they take for themselves. “One of the greatest unwritten rules of business,” says Gina Drosos, in charge of a $20 billion beauty business at Procter Gamble (PG), is that it’s so important to appreciate the hard work of your team and the people around you.” As Drosos notes, the higher you climb, the less you do it all yourself.

9. Don’t leave before you leave. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg introduced this advice in an essay that she wrote in Fortune‘s 2009 Most Powerful Women issue. She wrote the piece out of frustration–seeing way too many young women crimp career ambitions as they anticipate having children or otherwise settling down. Instead of “leaning back”–and then, almost inevitably getting bored–Sandberg advises: “Take life one step at a time and don’t make decisions before you have to.”

10.  Own your power. Most women on our MPW list cringed at the word “power” 13 years ago when we launched the annual rankings. Sandberg came around eventually (She describes her “a ha moment” in a recent New Yorker profile). Oprah Winfrey has too. The secret to getting comfortable with your power is to define it your own way. My favorite definition comes from Oprah, who told me: “Power is the ability to impact with purpose.”

Click here to view more from the Fortune Most Powerful Women-Yahoo (YHOO) Shine “Power Your Future” series.

For updates on the Fortune Most Powerful Women community, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Posted in: Avon, business women, Career advice, fortune mpw, Indra Nooyi, leadership advice, Most Powerful Women, OPrah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, top women in business, women ceos

Share and Enjoy