Management 管理學新生: Herbert David Kelleher ( 1931 – January 3, 2019) 西南航空方式

2019年1月14日星期一

Herbert David Kelleher ( 1931 – January 3, 2019) 西南航空方式

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.

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Herb Kelleher
Herb Kelleher at the 2007 Tony Jannus Awards
Born	Herbert David Kelleher March 12, 1931 Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	January 3, 2019 (aged 87) Dallas, Texas, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Wesleyan University (BA) New York University (JD)
Known for	Co-founder of Southwest Airlines
Net worth	US$2.5 billion (January 2019)^[1]

Herbert David Kelleher (March 12, 1931 – January 3, 2019) was an American billionaireairline executive and lawyer. He was the co-founder, later CEO, and chairman emeritus of Southwest Airlines until his death in 2019.

Under Kelleher's leadership, Southwest succeeded by a strategy of offering low fares to its passengers, eliminating unnecessary services, using a single aircraft type (the Boeing 737) (except for use of the Boeing 727 and use of MD-80 by TranStar and 717 by AirTran), avoiding the hub-and-spoke scheduling system used by other airlines in favor of building point-to-point traffic, and focusing on secondary airports such as Chicago-Midway (instead of Chicago-O'Hare) and Orange County, California^[5] but later some hub flights were operated at airports, such as LAS, PHX, MDW, DEN, STL, and BWI and some major airports, like LGA, LAX, SFO, and DEN. The company he founded and built has consistently been named among the most admired companies in America in Fortune magazine's annual poll.^[14]Fortune has also called him perhaps the best CEO in America.^[5]

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

—Herb Kelleher^[15]

Kelleher's outrageous personality created a corporate culture which made Southwest employees well known for taking themselves lightly but their jobs seriously.^[16] His culture-leadership was well-demonstrated in an arm-wrestling event in March 1992. Shortly after Southwest started using the "Just Plane Smart" motto, Stevens Aviation, who had been using "Plane Smart" for their motto, threatened a trademark lawsuit, which was resolved between Kelleher and Stevens Aviation CEO Kurt Herwald in an arm-wrestling match, now known as "Malice in Dallas".^[17]^[18]^[10] Kelleher lost the match but was allowed to use the slogan in exchange for a charitable donation and conceding Southwest's legal claim to the slogan. ^[19]