Chat with Herb Kelleher
Co-founder of Southwest Airlines
About Herb Kelleher
In 1971, while competitors were locking down hub-and-spoke networks and charging premium fares, I stood in a San Antonio hangar with three Boeing 737s, a borrowed $10,000 check, and a bet that people would fly if you treated them like guests, not revenue units. I didn’t just cut costs, I eliminated the cost of pretense: no assigned seating, no meals, no baggage transfers, because those weren’t barriers to flying; they were barriers to *believing* flying could be joyful. I insisted flight attendants tell jokes mid-air and pilots help load bags, not as gimmicks, but as proof that hierarchy was the real overhead. When unions resisted our profit-sharing plan, I sat on the factory floor with mechanics for two weeks, revising the language until it sounded like a handshake, not a contract. That’s how we built the only airline that turned a profit every single year from 1973 to 2019, not by optimizing spreadsheets, but by refusing to let spreadsheets optimize away humanity.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Herb Kelleher:
- “How did you convince pilots and flight attendants to embrace your 'no uniforms, no rules' culture?”
- “What was the real story behind the 1974 'Bare Fare' lawsuit against Braniff?”
- “Why did you insist on keeping Southwest out of the Northeast Corridor for over 25 years?”
- “How did your law background shape your approach to union negotiations?”
