Southwest Ceo Quotes

According to Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, a company’s purpose should answer the question, “Why do we exist?” Kelly adds, “We exist to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.”6 Only storytelling can rally passionate people around a common purpose. Each week Kelly gives a “shout out”—public praise—to employees who have gone above and beyond to show great customer service. Each month the Southwest Spirit magazine features the story of an employee who has gone above and beyond. Southwest highlights positive behaviors through a variety of recognition programs and awards. Finally, internal corporate videos are filled with real examples and stories to help employees visualize what each step of the purpose looks and feels like.

As Colleen Barrett, a former Southwest CEO, says, “We’re in the customer-service business; we happen to offer air transportation. We consider our employees to be our number one customer, our passengers our second, and our shareholders our third.

However, leadership is not confined to the CEO. Leadership is better understood as a process that can take place at any level of an organization.

Take Obama’s challenge, in January 2010, to the assembled CEOs at the Forum on Modernizing Government: “If you can book dinner on OpenTable, or a flight on Southwest or United online, then why shouldn’t you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way?

The events of September 11, 2001 presented an unprecedented ethical challenge to the business leaders of the airline industry. From Jim Parker’s own lecture (Parker. 2010) and his book Do the Right Thing (Parker, 2008) as well as other publicly available material, we can highlight the ethical business decisions of Jim Parker, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Southwest Airlines at that time, and the highly positive business impact these decisions had on Southwest Airlines.

It’s about corporate America, the rich and the super rich are taking money from the poor and the middle class and giving it, with the help of the Republican party, to the rich, to CEOs who earn a hundred and forty million dollars after they’re forced out of a company when it’s losing money. It’s about defending pensions from corporate bankruptcy tricks and your private property from eminent domain to put up Wal-Marts. It’s about immigration reform which puts an end to the senseless death of the poor but ambitious in the deserts of the southwest, it’s about recognizing the importance of the contribution of Mexican Americans to our national culture.

The customer is sometimes wrong. —HERB KELLEHER, FORMER CHAIRMAN AND CEO, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

The number-one threat is us,” Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, told his people at a big company meeting. “We must not let success breed complacency, cockiness, greediness, laziness, indifference, preoccupation with nonessentials; bureaucracy; hierarchy; quarrelsomeness; or obliviousness to threats posed by the outside world.”4