Southwest Case Study

Ann Rhoades' pondering the implied problems of competitive pressures, over confidence on the part of management and employees, and the future succession of the CEO position from Kellsher are not the real points of issues that she should be concerned with. I think all these issues will always be handled seamlessly as long as Southwest maintains the corporate culture that Kellsher has woven with his fellow employees. The real trick for Southwest is not to concern themselves with Continental, United, Reno Air, Jet Blue, etc. . . These airlines didn't start with the same hurdles that Southwest did. Kellsher and Southwest started with the US government passing laws in order to keep the company from successfully starting up. When a group of people start something together and have to ban together and trust one another because its them against the rest of the world, the team comes first, and everyone helps out. That is what I think Kelleher meant when he said, "We have to be the world's first company to refute the old law that companies die from excessive prosperity."

Southwest needs to realize that some other airline will always be out there trying to take their customers away from them, but these companies are not going to change there corporate cultures to do it. They look at the smiling flight attendants and the happy pilots and the unions of Southwest and think that its just a "gimmick." They think that it must be something else, just tell the employees to fake it, and smile. Just work as hard and fast as Southwest's people do. United isn't going to start 2-day workgroup classes to build employee moral and build a better working relationship between the pilots and mechanics. Continental and United should of concentrated on what they do best and worked on doing it better. No one every became successful by pointing at someone else and saying, "I don’t want them to be successful anymore, lets try to hurt them by meditating their business model that we don’t know anything about."

Southwest needs to continue reinventing ways to keep their corporate culture a happy and positive, team oriented place to work. Additionally, I believe that their hiring practices, if applied to a CEO search, would result in good candidate to succeed Kelleher. I believe that all of the companies future hurdles will be easily over come if they are able to continue their successful HR / Customer Relations programs.