Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
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Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#2Notably, 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.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#3[dead]
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#4What a difference 16 years can make!
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#5What a difference 16 years can make!
Old enough to drive!
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#6Title needs a "(2006)" suffix.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#7Notably, 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.
lol, no
Herb built up quite a cult, and he was around on the board of directors until 2008. While Gary is a colossal prick what we're seeing is absolutely Herb's legacy. Southwest had already outgrown its reputation as Herb's scrappy little airline by the 2000s. The meltdown is due, in large part, to practices that worked well enough with 90 jets but don't scale to the largest 737 fleet in the world. That lack of automation? That's on Herb, Gary didn't just suddenly decide to walk back a bunch of shit and decree that Southwest employees had to do everything by hand.
American and Delta built out SABRE and Deltamatic in the 60s, United built out Apollo in the early 70s. Under Herb, Southwest basically did everything by hand until they started maybe thinking about buying into the full SABRE suite a couple decades ago. They only just integrated ticketing (with Apollo, SABRE, and Amadeus) in like 2017. Their scheduling (which is the biggest pain point right now) is still done the old-fashioned Herb way. As of 2019 Southwest was still doing load planning manually (a.k.a. counting bags by hand and using assumed weights). Notably this got them in hot water with the FAA.
While things didn't reach a tipping point until Herb died, he did not leave Southwest on the right course. He created a nifty little airline but utterly failed to scale it. The continued lack of investment is on Gary and Bob, of course.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#8Good 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 probably contingency planning as well. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am sure there were/are people who knew this was a ticking time bomb.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#9for the rest of us, prepare for interviews and keep looking for jobs when you have a stable job.
Re: Herb Kelleher: Manage in Good Times So You'll Do Well in the Bad Times (2006)
#10Title needs a "(2006)" suffix.
Added. Thanks!