What Southwest Airlines Taught Us This Year

Southwest Airlines celebrated its 40th this year and was kind enough to share in its in-flight magazine 40 lessons it learned since 1971. The lessons provide good tips for business leaders.

If you missed the full list, here are some of the highlights:

• Invent your own culture and put a top person in charge of it.
• A crisis can contain the germ of a big idea.
• Simplicity has value. For Southwest, simplicity means using 737s for most of its fleet, which makes maintenance more cost-effective and allows more efficient training for flight crews and ground crews.
• Remember your chief mission.
• Take your business, not yourself, seriously.
• Put the worker first. For Southwest, that meant being the first U.S. airline to offer a profit-sharing plan, in 1974. Employees now own 13 percent of the airline.
• The web ain't cool, it's a tool. Southwest was the first U.S. airline to establish a home page. By 2010, Southwest.com boasted more unique visitors than any other airline, and ranked as the second largest travel site.
• Get Green. That means for Southwest embracing conservation.
• Manage permanence. Southwest knows what not to change, even when it's managing change.
• Keep the idea simple enough to draw on a napkin.
• Never rest on your laurels.
• It's about customer service, not scalability.
• Promote from within.
• Recognize your luck.

 One can learn a lot of Southwest!  Thank You!