Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly happened at Southwest?
They canceled close to 3000 flights in the last few days, stranding hundreds of thousands of people.
I think they were doing close to 3k per day for a few days
Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Culture is far more important than IT Is it though? I'm not saying culture is unimportant, but IT seems pretty damn important to them right now, given the situation, which culture didn't prevent and won't fix.
>Is it though? Would you rather deal with an organization that's 90th percentile in culture and 10th in IT or the other way around? Obviously being terrible at either will handicap you but a dearth of good culture will probably cause problems long before a dearth of good IT will. IT has less capability to cover for bad culture and process than good culture and process has to cover for bad IT.
Agreed culture is important, but no amount of culture can make up for a lack of IT investment.
Is it possible for a company to be too culture-focused though, where they are so enamored with how great their culture is that they neglect other important aspects of their business?
I also wonder how often a company has a "good" culture overall, but it doesn't extend to IT. With outsourcing, I think you can see that happening, and the rest of the non-IT workers can be oblivious to it.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol, but then why didn't SW run into this huge mess years ago, or decades ago? It's because while IT and automation matters, it's not the only thing that matters. The most important thing a CEO can do, especially in this industry, is set culture. That's their greatest role. Culture is far more important than IT. Herb's positive legacy in this industry is well deserved. This is because Herb set the culture at Southwes…
lol, but then why didn't SW run into this huge mess years ago, or decades ago? They have, like clockwork. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-airlines-computer-out... https://www.globaldatavault.com/blog/southwest-airlines-avoi... Southwest Airlines flights across the country were held up Wednesday while the airline worked to fix technology problems. … Last October, an outage caused about 800 Southwest flights to…
All of your examples are after 2016, none of them refutes the GP’s point —- Herb Kelleher’s time as CEO ended in 2001. He resigned from the board in 2009. Blaming him for SW’s recent issues is stretching it.
Recall when Satya Nadella was hailed as Microsoft’s savior only a couple years after becoming CEO? That is how quickly a new leader can have an impact. SW’s network has expanded significantly since Herb Kelleher’s time, it’s hardly his fault its IT can’t keep up.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#34Yet, what we do in good times is cut margins until they are so thin that the good times get better, and then everything explodes during bad times so everyone asks for bailouts
Eg, unsustainable agriculture, manufacturing, banking…
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#35Notably, Kelleher stepped down from the CEO role at Southwest in 2001. So this crazy debacle of 2022 is largely a result of management that has not followed Kelleher's guidance.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Pretty sure there’s a quote from Herb saying that southwest was going to be “high touch, low tech”. Herb was a legend for going up against the big airlines and winning but he was the right person for the right time. A war time ceo if you will. Southwest doesn’t need Jobs they need Cook, someone who can build out and scale now that they’re established.
The airline industry as a whole is known to have antiquated tech and hard to clean data. Someone mentioned in one of the threads last week how difficult it is to modernize these systems where every system is using different timestamp formats. Southwest is just more antiquated and probably at least 5 years behind the rest of the industry in modernizing. Especially with crew systems which is what blew everything up last week.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#36Good times are for getting the house in order so things don’t go sideways in the future and creating frameworks for when things inevitably do go sideways. If you have good plans and everyone is one the same page people can fall back to standard operating procedure and not over think things or panic because they don’t know what to do. In the case of Southwest they failed to invest in critical infrastructure and probab…
What exactly happened at Southwest?
There are some threads online from Southwest employees. Essentially the entire system, which relied on dialing in via phone, failed catastrophically.
Those employees could, if not see this coming, at least knew the system was antiquated and brittle. A failure of some magnitude was inevitable. This failure however was so bad that they lost everything. They didn’t know where their own planes were, where their crew was, where baggage was, anything. It was all lost or at least inaccessible for days. The details of how and why the failure happened I am sure will come out, but essentially this was tech debt that the previous CEO saw no value in improving.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly happened at Southwest?
There are some threads online from Southwest employees. Essentially the entire system, which relied on dialing in via phone, failed catastrophically. Those employees could, if not see this coming, at least knew the system was antiquated and brittle. A failure of some magnitude was inevitable. This failure however was so bad that they lost everything. They didn’t know where their own planes were, where their crew was,…
Thanks! Very insightful.
Can you share links to the threads you mention?
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some threads online from Southwest employees. Essentially the entire system, which relied on dialing in via phone, failed catastrophically. Those employees could, if not see this coming, at least knew the system was antiquated and brittle. A failure of some magnitude was inevitable. This failure however was so bad that they lost everything. They didn’t know where their own planes were, where their crew was,…
Thanks! Very insightful. Can you share links to the threads you mention?
Here is a reddit thread from a Southwest Pilot and has a quote from some other employees as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/zw6upo/h...