The secret of Southwest’s success
The passing last week of Herbert D. Kelleher, the co-founder of Southwest Airlines, has spawned one of the greatest outpourings of praise and fond memories of a business leader any of us may ever see again.
Mr. Kelleher — almost no one actually called him that — was just plain Herb to friends, employees, competitors and even to journalists who were supposed to keep any personal feelings about those they wrote about to themselves.
That kind of reserve instantly melted the moment you met Herb, always joking and laughing, making the visitor feel comfortable and never coming across the way some corporate executives do: puffed up, acting like the smartest guy in the room. In fact, Herb usually was the smartest guy in the room. But as an airline reporter looking back at three decades of Herb’s exploits, one word characterizes the man and his legacy: love. If Herb had not had such a strong love for both people and hard work, he could not have inspired Southwest’s employees to pour their hearts into a company that is not only perennially profitable but also makes its customers love it back.
Herb’s love affair with life and those around him started long before Southwest established its headquarters at Dallas Love Field in the 1970s and adopted LUV as its New York Stock Exchange trading symbol. Herb, a San Antonio lawyer at the time, and businessman Rollin King may have first sketched out the concept of Southwest one evening in the 1960s in the St. Anthony Hotel bar. But the seeds for what kind of company it would become were planted 25 years earlier in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
By the start of World War II, Herb’s three older siblings had left home. His father, Harry Kelleher, died in 1943, leaving him alone as a high school student in Haddon Heights, N.J., with his mother, Ruth. In an interview with me for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, Herb described his mother as “a wonderful person,” an egalitarian who had no use for the high-born. In talks that would last long into the night, Herb said, Ruth taught him that everyone, no matter who their parents were, where they were from or where they were educated, deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. And that, he said, was the philosophical underpinning for running Southwest.
Of course, the business model Southwest perfected — flying only one type of jet, having no reserved seats yet one of the less-chaotic boarding processes, a low simplified fare structure, no fees for the first two checked bags, no ridiculous penalties for changing the day or time of a ticket — is the foundation of its financial success. And no one outworked Herb at sticking to the model and never losing sight of delivering value to shareholders, which includes all its employees.
But Herb’s influence over the airline created something else, something beyond turning the little company from Texas into the people’s airline, flying more passengers annually than any other. He created Ruth Kelleher’s egalitarian workplace — which, by the way, is largely unionized — where people like what they do, are appreciated by the company and are paid accordingly. Those people in turn treat customers with dignity and respect, committing random acts of kindness every day that are as natural for them as breathing.
It is precisely that corporate culture that sets Southwest apart from the rest of its industry. Many other airlines provide a safe, relatively high-quality product, yet they struggle to be respected or even liked as much as Herb’s airline is.