Success Quote by David Neeleman

In one breezy sentence, Neeleman turns a gadget into a moral alibi. The Blackberry isn’t framed as a convenience; it’s “really essential,” the kind of language that smuggles a choice into the category of necessity. That word choice matters. It recasts constant connectivity not as a personal preference or a workplace norm he helps enforce, but as an operational requirement of modern leadership.

The subtext is the quiet brag embedded in the parenthetical: “which is a lot.” He’s not just out of the office; he’s in motion, living the executive ideal of perpetual elsewhere-ness. The line sells mobility as productivity and productivity as virtue. The Blackberry becomes the prosthetic that makes that identity legible: even when physically absent, the boss is digitally present. For employees, partners, and investors, that’s reassurance. For everyone else, it’s a signal that the boundary between work and life has been negotiated away and rebranded as efficiency.

The context is crucial: the Blackberry era was the moment email stopped being a place you went and became something that followed you. For a businessman building and managing complex operations, it’s easy to read this as practical. But culturally, it’s also a snapshot of how “being responsive” became a status symbol, then a baseline expectation. Neeleman’s intent is managerial and self-explanatory; the deeper effect is to normalize a world where absence is no longer a legitimate condition, only a connectivity problem waiting to be solved.