Kelleher: Distill Strategy to Doing, Not Planning

"We’ve never done the long-range planning that is customary in many businesses. When planning became big in the airline community, one of the analysts came up to me and said, “Herb, I understand you don’t have a plan.” I said that we have the most unusual plan in the industry: Doing things. That’s our plan. What we do by way of strategic planning is we define ourselves and then we redefine ourselves."

"Kelleher was able to distill complex ideas into comprehensible information that every employee, regardless of position or intelligence, could understand."

"One of the things that we do is continue to emphasize that we value our people as people, not just workers. Any event that you have in your life that is celebratory in nature or brings grief, you hear from Southwest Airlines. If you lose a relative, you hear from us. If you’re out sick with a serious illness, you hear from us, and I mean by telephone, by letter, by remembrances from us. If you have a baby, you hear from us. What we’re trying to say to our people is, “Hey, wait a second, we value you as a total person, not just between eight and five.”2 Intelligent"