Air Herb's secret weapon - Chief Executive of the Year - interview with Southwest Airlines Chief Executive Officer Herb Kelleher - Cover Story

Chief Executive, The, July-August, 1999 by J.P. Donlon

Every anniversary of a Southwest Airlines employee is recognized. All the holidays are recognized; all the marriages; all the deaths in the family; that sort of thing, which is very, very personal.

Do you have banners and cakes every month? You must be doing this every day.

We have a lot of celebrations of different things, but I'm talking about personal communications in terms of cards, in terms of notes - "sorry to hear about the death of your grandfather" - that sort of thing. And that is a prodigious process for 27,000 people. But I would estimate, and this is just off the top of my head, that everybody at Southwest Airlines - all 27,000 - hear from us in one way or another, probably five times a year.

You've been quoted as saying, "We hire attitude." That's nice. But everybody claims that, don't they?

But they don't value it. They don't pay all that much attention to it. They don't make it a priority. I've been with companies where they have an opening, and you know what they consider the function of their personnel department? To plug that hole as quickly as they possibly can. That's quite different from what we do in many cases. Some years ago our vice president of the people department told me the department had interviewed 34 people for a ramp agent position in Amarillo, TX, and she was a little embarrassed about the amount of time it was taking and the implied cost of it, and my answer was, "If you have to interview 134 people to get the right attitude on the ramp in Amarillo, TX, do it."

Can you talk about what the attitude is?

First of all, it's an attitude of humility, one of modesty. Secondly, it's an attitude of selflessness, altruism, where perhaps doing things for other people is the way you ennoble yourself instead of doing things for yourself, concentrating on you. We're trying to find out what people are really like at the center of their being - whether they have a sense of humor, whether they have the servant leadership attitude and mentality, whether they have the capability of being leaders too. You hire somebody for one job, but we're looking for the capability and the leadership qualities that will enable them to rise through the ranks.

You use words like selflessness, humility - are these employees or an order of monks?

It's kind of funny that you would say that. I was talking at the Yale Graduate School of Business some years ago. In the Q&A session, one of the students stood up and said, "It seems to me you're talking more about a religion than a business." And I said, "If you feel that way about your business, I think that's good. That's a plus."

ON FOREIGN SKIES AND COMPETITION

In its current policy, the U.S. seeks to open international markets to its "open skies" initiative on keeping the U.S. domestic market closed to foreign competition. Do you favor changing the current system?

When you're looking at the largest market in the world, you have to ask yourself, how do we get a comparable return? You don't get a comparable return if you open the largest market in the world, for instance, to one of the smallest markets in the world. You're only deceiving yourself if you think you could effect a deal whereby in return for open skies and foreign ownership in America, America received the right to have open skies and own European airlines in the European Union. That wouldn't be a fair exchange. But you know, you have to deal with blocks of countries in order to get a fair quid pro quo for what you're giving up.