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.”