How this CEO went from selling snacks to running a fleet of airplanes

• Captain Izham Ismail started flying for Malaysia Airlines in 1979 and became its CEO in 2017.
• He thinks leaders should be “servants” for both the organization’s staff, as well as its customers.
• Ismail believes it’s OK to make mistakes: “The more you fail, the faster you learn.”

Not too many CEOs admit to filling up their stomachs with water at school to stave off hunger pains, but then again Datuk Captain Izham Ismail is not a typical boss. 

He also recalls selling snacks at school to bring in extra money for his family in rural Malaysia, who were so poor they didn’t have a bathroom and could only afford one meal a day: “I know how it feels to be poor.”

Yet despite coming from such a modest background, Ismail went on to become a pilot and then run Malaysia Airlines, one of the world’s oldest carriers. 

Things could have turned out quite differently had he decided to take up a scholarship he won to study marine engineering at Bournemouth University in England in the 1970s. Before accepting his place, one of Ismail’s four sisters convinced him to take an entrance exam for flying school.

He became one of just seven who made it through to the interview stage, which required borrowing shoes and trousers from a family friend, to become a cadet pilot with Philippine Airlines. Ismail was one of only two accepted in that intake. He opted to take up the offer rather than go to the UK, mainly because it allowed him to remain much closer to his family, and took just two years – far quicker than a degree course. 

Ismail started flying for Malaysia Airlines in 1979, became a captain and a decade later was selected for its senior management training scheme. That meant reducing his time in the cockpit to one trip a month, while moving around 18 different positions in the group, and taking management courses at the likes of MIT and Stanford.

In 2010 he stopped flying altogether – but not before setting world records for the longest flight and fastest round-the-world flight by a commercial airliner, with a total flight time of 41 hours 59 minutes over a distance of 23,310 miles in Malaysia’s first Boeing 777-200.

After running one of its regional carriers and becoming group chief operating officer, Ismail was elevated to CEO of Malaysia Airlines in 2017. 

His leadership philosophy is quite simple: be transparent. “Leaders should be servants,” he says – not only for their employees, but for their customers as well. “It’s very important as a CEO to depict the vision and goals of the organization.” 

He makes a point of saying he drives himself to work and took Ubers at the IATA annual conference in Istanbul prior to his visit to London in June, where we met at the airline’s offices in Earls Court. 

Ismail is a warm, engaging interviewee and largely avoids the management-speak favored by some CEOs.  

While running an airline is perhaps one of the harder management challenges (“you never have a good sleep as a CEO,” Ismail says), he got the job following a particularly challenging set of circumstances.  

In March 2014 MH 370 with 239 people on board disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. (Earlier this year, a Netflix documentary reminded the world of that enduring mystery.) Then, just four months later, MH 17 was shot down over Ukraine by Russian-controlled forces, killing all 298 people on board.

In December 2014, Malaysian state-owned sovereign wealth fund Khazanah took the already loss-making airline private in a $1.5 billion restructuring and brought in Christopher Mueller as CEO six months later. He’d helped revive Ireland’s Aer Lingus, Belgium’s Sabena, and Germany’s Lufthansa. 

While its legal entity was altered and there was some internal discussion about rebranding the airline, Ismail said the management and board decided not to change it. The kite symbol on the tailfin has represented Malaysia to the world for a century and he says each plane is like an “embassy on wings.”

The company is still controlled by the Malaysian government and acts as an extension of the country’s tourism board to some extent, offering passengers from London a bonus side trip in Malaysia before continuing on to their final destination, for example. 

After a misguided attempt to jump on the budget bandwagon, in 2019 it implemented a long-term business plan and refocused as a premium, full-service carrier. 

While the pandemic delayed its revival, the group nevertheless reported a $125 million operating profit last year – a considerable improvement on the $173 million loss in 2021 – after carrying just under 10 million passengers, or about 85% of pre-pandemic capacity. It’s a member of the One World alliance, which includes British Airways and American Airlines.

Malaysia Airlines has 11,000 staff, down from 35,000 two decades ago, and flies to almost 50 destinations, mostly in Asia, with 106 aircraft that are all leased. That’s far fewer than an airline such as American, for example, which has about 950 planes.

After losing its way – and some staff – over the past two decades to newer Middle Eastern rivals such as Qatar Airways and Emirates, Ismail says, “Our journey is to catch up.” He insists that is possible – even if it means sometimes failing on the way: “The more you fail, the faster you learn.”