Carlzon started his career in the international
hospitality industry at Vingresor AB. Carlzon was Product Manager at Vingresor AB from 1969 to 1971, Director of Marketing at Vingresor/Club 33 AB from 1971 to 1973, and finally CEO from 1974 to 1978. and had an international reputation for always being late. A 1981 survey showed that SAS was ranked no. 14 of 17 airlines in Europe when it came to punctuality. Furthermore, the company had a reputation for being a very centralized organization, where decisions were hard to come by to the detriment of customers, shareholders, and staff. He revolutionized the airline industry through an unrelenting focus on customer service quality. One of the first things Jan Carlzon did at SAS was to introduce the world's first separate cabin for
Business Class while at the same time doing away with
First Class on its European routes. Within one year of taking over, SAS had become the most punctual airline in Europe and had started an ongoing training program called
Putting People First developed by
Claus Møller of
Time Manager International ('TMI'). The program was focused on delegating responsibility away from management and allowing customer-facing staff to make decisions to resolve any issues on the spot. Jan Carlzon said at the time: "''Problems are solved on the spot, as soon as they arise. No front-line employee has to wait for a supervisor's permission.''". These changes soon impacted the bottom-line as well and the company made a profit of $54 million in 1982. This decentralisation of the organization led to both a large boost in company morale and the formalization of the training methodology of the program in a joint venture in 1982 with TMI called
Scandinavian Service School. Scandinavian Service School since went on to establish offices in all three of the Scandinavian countries as well as Finland and the training program was exported to other airlines including
British Airways and
Japan Airlines. The flat organizational structure, delegation processes, and empowerment of employees adopted at SAS also led to Carlzon writing a book,
Riv pyramiderna! (
Swe., which translates into
Tear Down the Pyramids), published by
Bonnier in Stockholm in 1985 and translated into English in 1987 by
Harper Perennial under the title
Moments of Truth. The
American Management Association, in their 75th anniversary issue of their magazine in 1998 called this one of the most important developments in management of the 20th century. The changes at SAS led to
Air Transport World naming SAS the
Airline of the Year for 1983 in early 1984. Carlzon also oversaw a complete
corporate identity re-design, a process which was marred when a journalist gained unlawful access to a hangar with a plane painted in a proposed livery was photographed and widely published in Scandinavian newspapers. Unfortunately, either the brief to the agency,
Landor Associates, was not good enough or they had misunderstood it and painted the plane with 5 crowns to symbolize the 5
Nordic countries. This caused a huge public furore as SAS only contains the airlines of the three monarchies Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Incidentally, the other two Nordic countries,
Finland and
Iceland, are both republics and would therefore not be represented by crowns. The task of re-developing the corporate identity was later given to another firm. In the latter years of Carlzon's tenure at SAS he was coming under increased pressure from shareholders as competitors had caught up with the lead established by SAS in the business market in the early 1980s. At the same time increasing oil prices and a less than profitable first class operation led to SAS scrapping First Class on its intercontinental routes and retiring its
Boeing 747s from service, a task completed in 1987. SAS has never since flown aircraft with as large a capacity as it does not believe the flights would be profitable.
After SAS Carlzon left SAS in November 1993 and founded the investment company Ledstiernan in 1994 where he was chairman. Carlzon was also one of the founders of the Internet retail company CDON AB. In 1999 he (who is an avid tennis player in his spare time) became chair of the
Swedish Tennis Association and a board member in the
International Tennis Federation. He served as chair of the British Swedish Chamber of Commerce between 2003 and 2006 and, until June 2010, he chaired the entrepreneurs' organization Företagarna. He was also one of the founders of European
telecoms company NETnet International S.A. and is part owner and chair of Karl Stockman AB, a Swedish investment company. ==Personal life==