Herb Kelleher Quotes

She treated me as an adult, and her interests were wide ranging. We would stay up till three, four, five in the morning, talking about business, politics, ethics. She was a splendid person, and she gave me a wonderful foundation.

There was this very dignified gentleman in our neighborhood, the president of a local savings and loan, who used to stroll along in a very regal way up until he was indicted and convicted of embezzlement. My mother said that positions and titles signify absolutely nothing. They're just adornments; they don't represent the substance of anybody.

Just the other day, when they gave me the B boarding pass, I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to call my mother and tell her I finally got a B.’

I had a little apartment on Washington Square, and you could just open your door and entertaining people would walk in and you’d have an instant party.

We have the best customer satisfaction record, based on Transportation Dept. statistics, of any airline in America, the fewest complaints filed per 100,000 passengers carried. So you’re not just getting low fares, you’re also getting wonderful customer service.

When deregulation took place, our fabulous Austin advertising agency, GSD&M…said to me: ‘Herb, now we have deregulation. Anybody can fly anyplace they want to. They can charge anything the want to. What’s special about Southwest Airlines?’ Our people…anybody can buy the tangibles, but nobody can replicate the intangibles very easily. And I'm talking about the joie de vivre - the spirit of our people.

If you’re wrong, you slit your own throat.

We’ve gotten one complaint in five years that said Southwest Airlines employees aren’t that way.

A guy calls our Dallas reservation center from St. Louis, and he tells the reservation agent that TWA has canceled its flight out of DFW to St. Louis on which his 85-year-old mother was supposed to fly, and that he's very concerned about her coming over to Love Field after having to make an intermediate connection in Tulsa. So the reservation agent says: I'm going to be off in five minutes. I'll pick her up at DFW, drive her to Love Field, and fly with her to St. Louis to make sure that she gets there ok.

We have a People Dept. That’s what it deals with, so don’t call it Human Resources – that sounds like something from a Stalin five-year plan. You know, how much coal you can mine. We say everybody is a leader, no matter what your job is. We want you to focus on customer service - and not just to the outside world - customer service to the inside world. If [employees] pollute our other people internally and they in turn savage the people who are doing the work outside, the whole company has just rotted.

I always felt that our people came first. Some of the business schools regarded that as a conundrum. They would say: Which comes first, your people, your customers, or your shareholders? And I would say, it's not a conundrum. Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they'll treat the customers right, and the customers will come back, and that'll make the shareholders happy.

We’ve always tried to be sensitive to the needs of our people and recognize the things that are important to them in their personal lives.

At Southwest Airlines, you can’t have a baby without being recognized – getting communication from the general office. You can't have a death in your family without hearing from us. If you're out with a serious illness, we're in touch with you once every two weeks to see how you're doing. We have people who have been retired for 10 years, and we keep in touch with them. We want them to know that we value them as individuals, not just as workers. So that's part of the esprit de corps.

Western Airlines asked to borrow a stapler in Los Angeles, and our customer-service agent went over with the stapler to their counter, and the Western ticket agent said: Why are you [waiting]? He said: Because I want the stapler back. That affects our profit sharing.

We feel that everybody, no matter where they work or what they do, should have an ownership position in the company. And we have seven, I think - or maybe eight - collective-bargaining agreements with our unions.

First of all, if you come here, you'll be happy. And No. 2, if you come here, you'll be the most highly compensated employee in the airline industry. Not compensated the way other airlines compensate people, but when you put it all together, why do you care?

We have a good many MBAs, but we look at them for attitude as well. We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude. Because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.

Humble MBAs – people who think they’re just starting out on their career and have a lot to learn.

Once they’ve done all that, then they’re ready to start doing planning and all those other things.

The core of our success. That’s the most difficult thing for a competitor to imitate. They can buy all the physical things. The things you can’t buy are dedication, devotion, loyalty – the feeling that you are participating in a crusade.

[I] learned it by doing it, and I was scared to death.

I stayed up all night familiarizing myself with its problems. PATCO (the air-traffic controllers’ union) had just pulled 13,000 controllers out of the towers. We had six new airplanes coming. One of the analysts with Oppenheimer downgraded the stock when I moved in because he said I was a lawyer – and lawyers couldn’t run anything.

I told him: [A top executive] from U.S. Airways is going to be peeved with you. And he said: How come? I said: He’s a lawyer. He said: I never knew that. So we chatted for a spell, and then he wrote another piece and said he thought Southwest was going to be ok – despite the fact that it was headed by a lawyer.

I was always motivated. Even the things I wasn’t supposed to do, I undertook with great energy, dedication, and perseverance.

Everybody in Texas would tell me that they thought I was nuts trying to start Southwest Airlines. There probably weren't 10 people in the state who would have given a plug nickel for our chances of making a dollar. So sometimes, you need a little courage, too, just to buck popular opinion.

I think it was easier to be an entrepreneur in the '30s than it was in the '60s and '70s, and I think it was easier in the 1890s than it was in the '30s. As society becomes more regulated, it becomes more difficult to launch entrepreneurial ventures. It’s harder today – but not impossible.

You must be very patient, very persistent. The world isn't going to shower gold coins on you just because you have a good idea. You're going to have to work like crazy to bring that idea to the attention of people. They're not going to buy it unless they know about it.

You're going to have to have probably five times as much capital as you thought you would. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you're optimistic by nature. So you think, in six months, we're going to be sailing. But that optimism causes you to raise a lot less capital than you need in most cases, and it's very lonely.

Nobody believed that it would work, and the other carriers thought that we were just an annoyance, not something permanent.

It turned into a marathon because the incumbent carriers – Braniff, Trans-Texas, and Continental, didn’t want any competition. I was involved in 31 separate administrative and/or judicial proceedings with those carriers over four or five years. I made three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, and a judge at the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals said: I have sat on this bench for 30 years, and this is the worst case of business harassment I've ever seen.

We ran out of money in 1969, and the board of directors said: Let’s just shut this down. And I said: I’ll pay all the costs out of my own pocket and work for nothing to see if we can get this thing going. And fortunately, it did go.

Every time I’d go up there, they’d give me a lecture, and they’d say: Well, Herb, now that we’re deregulated, you’ve got to be just like the other airlines. And I said: No I don’t think so. And after about maybe nine or ten years, [an analyst] with Credit Suisse First Boston got up at an investor seminar and said, ‘For 10 years we've been telling Herb Kelleher how to run Southwest Airlines, and for 10 years he's been telling us to bug off. Since they're the most profitable airline in America, how about if we all bug off?’

If they want to fight a war, we’re ready to go to two years or five years or ten years, whatever it takes – in order to be successful.

I took an aptitude test in college, and it said there were three things I’d be fairly decent at, being a journalist, an editor, or a lawyer.

Down in San Antonio, when one of our customers was railing at one of our customers services agents and said: Don’t you know I’m a shareholder of Southwest Airlines? And the customer-service agent looked at her and said: Lady, we all are.

Here's the kind of letter that we got: Herb, I went through El Paso the other day, and I was sold a ticket by a customer-service agent who just isn't like Southwest Airlines. There is something wrong with this agent. You see the distinction? Not that Southwest Airlines is a bad apple, but this person is a bad apple, and I don't understand how you can allow that person to continue to work for you.

One of the managers in our People Department once said, ‘The important thing is to take the bricklayer and make him understand that he’s building a home, not just laying bricks.’ So we take the building a home approach: This is what you’re doing not only for yourself but for society: giving people who’d otherwise not be able to travel the opportunity to do so.

For me, the cancer was never an issue. It was just something I had to get through, and I tried to keep my sense of humour about it.

When I start to have more time, I have thought that I might write a few things. I might write about Southwest: It would be a fascinating story; I wouldn't change a thing.



Herb Kelleher Quotes

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