War and North American Airlines - Why Southwest Airlines is Different.

I suspect that an important casualty of this war will be the traditional North American "Full Service" airline. I suspect that they cannot be reformed as their basic flaw is one of culture. Yes Southwest have a number of operational differences such as a one model fleet, no hubs, no expensive reservation system and so on. But the real difference is in managerial culture. Southwest is where "Servant Leadership" is exemplified. Where the senior guys take the first pay cuts. Where staffing is mainly on attitude etc.  "They don't' have a unions" you say. But Southwest is 85% unionized - they have different relationship with their unions.

“Southwest’s secret is simple…You fly one type of plane, you concentrate on short, point to point routes, you don’t serve food and you don’t assign seats”. Kelleher slammed his fist down on the desk “Anyone can copy that, and they have. But they can’t copy the culture!”

Here is what the Chairman of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, thinks about this point. “Manage in good times to prepare for bad times. To succeed in today’s marketplace, the company cross trains employees  and increases their skill base so that individuals at all levels can take personal responsibility for keeping the company marketable, for maintaining high trust relationships, and identifying effective options for dealing with transitions.” In addition Kelleher and his leadership team inspire loyalty by communicating openly and truthfully with their staff, respecting the life work balance and fostering continuous learning. Southwest employees know that their voice matters and that they can implement new programs, make decisions and help customers in times of need. A guiding principle is: if you use your best judgment to do what is right, your leaders will stand behind you.

Donna Conover, EVP Customer Service (an interesting tile in itself) at Southwest Airlines explains that the company has high expectations for each employee: “Just doing your job well does not make you a good employee. The attitude and spirit towards others complete the needs the company has of the Employee. As leaders if we allow lack of teamwork or low productivity, we are being unfair to the rest of the team”.

My bet is that United and Air Canada will be gone in 6 months. For us in Canada this will leave a huge vacuum. The worst move would be to prop up the Zombie. The best would be to allow the vacuum to be filled by a new system. The key will be culture

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Rob is delivering some really great content.  Some key points from this piece:

• “Anyone can copy that, and they have. But they can’t copy the culture!”
• Manage in good times to prepare for bad times.
• company has high expectations for each employee
• Just doing your job well does not make you a good employee

What Southwest seem to have done is internalize a very healthy culture.  I wonder what kind of knowledge management practices they have in place.

One year blogging. One year ago on Friday, I started blogging. I created my first weblog and made my first post, to announce my first open source project, Python Community Server. Since then, just about everything computer-related I've done in my spare time has had something to do with blogging.

The first weblog I regularly read was Joel On Software. I found out about Dave Winer's Scripting News when looking for information on SOAP (during my brief period of contribution to the Mono project), and that lead me to Radio UserLand and much hacking on community servers.

Blogging has brought me in touch with loads of new people -- notably Rogers Cadenhead, who appeared one day on my blog server, Robert Barksdale, who's still blogging there, and Georg Bauer, who's pretty much taken over the work on the PyCS project. More recently Seb Paquet (Mr. Personal Publishing), Marc Canter (International Man of Mystery) and Matt Mower. The ecosystem project brought out N.Z. Bear and many others. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Stephen Dulaney (who does research into social behaviour when he's not writing software) started writing to me out of the blue, and we've had some great conversations.

So thanks, guys, for making my last year much more interesting, helping me grow as a programmer and inspiring me to hack up new tools and sites. I wonder where we'll be next year ...

Comment

[Second p0st]

Congratualations to Phil, he's achieved a huge amount in a short space of time.