Mary Dillon, former CEO of Foot Locker, Ulta Beauty and US Cellular and former CMO of McDoanld’s and President of Quaker Oats joins the American Airlines board.
Former American Airlines Chairman and CEO Doug Parker built a Board of Directors that he complained,
doesn’t have anyone on the board with airline expertise, that has worked for an airline before. That has an impact on their deliberations and their ability to understand.
Dillon does not have airline experience. She does have brand experience, and that would seem like a real missing piece as American tries to pivot to being more premium – all of the airline industry’s profits have been made recently in the premium segment, and American Airlines did not earn profit in 2025. Although American Airlines brand positioning has been too close to McDonald’s!
She has experience selling McNuggets and oatmeal at scale: highly processed, aggressively standardized, and impossible to confuse with hospitality. Apparently Lean Cuisine was unavailable.
Nothing says confidence in your premium product quite like adding a director whose food credentials are built on nuggets, oatmeal, and the triumph of low standards. Quaker at least gives you the dignity of knowing you’re eating gruel.
If you were trying to parody American Airlines catering, hiring someone tied to McDonalds and Quaker is almost too on the nose – food with all the warmth and ambition of an airport vending machine.
I do not know Mary Dillon and actually have no opinion on her addition to the board as such. She’s certaily an accomplished woman, and she does have brand experience which should be useful to American.
Lack of airline experience on the board is real, though. Experience in the travel industry broadly includes a former President of Hilton and former CFO of Boeing. But real airline experience is limited to former Northwest CEO Doug Steenland. Customers often describe American as America West having taking over but that is actually wrong. The problem with American has been that it’s way too heavily ex-Northwest running the show.
The bigger problem with the board than airline experience is that this is a group that has never held management accountable. One presumes Dillon wasn’t chosen to change this equilibrium, but perhaps she’ll surprise. She will serve on the Compensation Committee and the Corporate Governance and Public Responsibility Committee.
Maybe the new board member will fire Robert Isom and replace him with a non- USAiR person. American Airlines was a great airline before the arrival of of Parker and Robert Isom.
American actually has several very questionable board members, including the notorious Doug Steenland, formerly of Northwest Airlines. He ordered tens of millions in compensation for himself, including salary, bonuses, and retention incentives at Northwest after the airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005. Around the same time, Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, went on strike after refusing steep deep wage cuts.
Just to put this into perspective, Steenland’s projected pension was about ~$947,000 per year, while the typical long-tenured mechanic was about $40,000 per year after decades of work. This was on top of Steenland’s roughly $26.6 million tied to post-bankruptcy compensation.
So what was Steenland’s solution? He simply fired the long-tenured workers complaining about the wage cuts and replaced them.
And Steenland’s current role on the Board at American? Chairman of the Compensation Committee. It is the most outrageous, blatant slap in the face to every worker and shareholder that one could possibly imagine. It’s like a page straight out of banana republic governance.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: American Airlines will not meaningfully improve until its shareholders vote every last one of these Board members out and start over.
American Airlines wants to enter the world of premium airlines—because nothing says “luxury” quite like a new board member with executive experience with Happy Meals. So, the AA board picked Mary Dillon, ex-CMO of McDonald’s, instead of Ronald McDonald himself. The real critique here: if American Airlines aims to run like a circus, why not let a professional clown take the lead? Ronald is, after all, the only C-suite clown I would actually trust to make me smile after a six-hour delay and then a flight cancellation.
Maybe AA would benefit from their Board being mandated to fly to/from ALL AA-related events in Coach.
I’d guess that a few things would change when the Board are treated like self-loading cargo.
Warren Buffett liked to rant about how Corporate Boards were useless, if not harmful. This includes noting that when CEOs look for board members, they don’t go seeking pit bulls, they look for cocker spaniels. He complained they get $100K’s a year to attend several meetings, often at nice digs, and if they’re all good boys and girls they’ll get asked to stay on or even recommended to serve on other boards. Hence the whole idea of “independent” boards is crap.
You’ve been the CEO of how many airlines?
Having aviation experience or otherwise knowing anything about how to run an airline results in an automatic HR rejection to any legitimate candidate for AA’s Board of Directors…
Seems like a slightly harsh critique. AA needs help with brand building. Over the years Delta has relied on board level expertise from P&G execs. What does Tide have to do with flying Delta jets? Nothing. It’s the underlying principles of brand building.