Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success

Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success | Kevin Freiberg, Jackie Freiberg | The crazy culture of Southwest Airlines

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Nuts! Southwest Ai...

	Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success Kevin Freiberg, Jackie Freiberg Broadway, 1998 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Twenty-five years ago, Herb Kelleher reinvented air travel when he founded Southwest Airlines, where the planes are painted like killer whales, a typical company maxim is "Hire people with a sense of humor," and in-flight meals are never served--just sixty million bags of peanuts a year. By sidestepping "reengineering," "total quality management," and other management philosophies and employing its own brand of business success, Kelleher's airline has turned a profit for twenty-four consecutive years and seen its stock soar 300 percent since 1990.

Today, Southwest is the safest airline in the world and ranks number one in the industry for service, on-time performance, and lowest employee turnover rate; and Fortune magazine has twice ranked Southwest one of the ten best companies to work for in America. How do they do it?

With unlimited access to the people and inside documents of Southwest Airlines, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg share the secrets behind the greatest success story in commercial aviation. Read it and discover how to transfer the Southwest inspiration to your own business and personal life.

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Such a great story, everyone should read it. Especially anyone interested in business.

Yeah, this is a business book, but it is a lot more of value and is a lot more fun than most of them. Get it, read it, think about it, and enjoy it. The title has multiple meanings. It refers to Southwest's policy of giving its short haul passengers a bag of peanuts instead of meals (they give out tens of millions of bags each year). Those bags of nuts also stand for Southwest's healthy obsession with keeping their costs down so they can keep their fares low. And "Nuts!" also refers to the founders of the company starting a low cost airline in Texas in the age of regulated airlines (do you remember that time) and their radical approach to carrying passengers. Basically, outside of safety and maintenance, whatever the big airlines did, Southwest did it just about the opposite way.

Where the big airlines used the hub and spoke to fly more full flights, Southwest chose point-to-point and a 10-15 minutes turn around time to keep the planes in the air. Where the big airlines encouraged uniforms and professionalism, Southwest went with hotpants and outrageous behavior (now they use khaki shorts, but the personality of the flight attendants is more like a stand up routine). Instead of meals, peanuts. Instead of assigned seats, you pick it on board. Instead of the multi-part printed ticket, you get a paper receipt with the words "THIS IS A TICKET" printed on it. There is a LOT more just like this.

Learning from Herb Kelleher's approach to business and his actually being able to make money in the airline business is fascinating stuff. A great read because Kevin & Jackie Freiberg not only write well, they know how to organize the material to make it especially valuable to us. Just terrific. Strongly recommended to everyone because it is such an interesting story.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

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The crazy culture of Southwest Airlines

Kevin and Jackie Freiberg began studying Southwest Airlines when Kevin was a doctoral student. This lively, funny and, at times, moving book is full of information about the origins of Southwest Airlines, what makes it unique and how it fights hard to keep its family-based culture, despite having more than 33,000 employees. Wonderful stories told by employees, letters from customers and comments from other business leaders demonstrate the principles that the authors discuss. The book is divided into four sections, with the last looking at leadership in general and as practiced at Southwest. This book was originally published in 1996, but every word of it is perfectly applicable today. Southwest Airlines is still making a profit and growing where other airlines are losing money by the planeload. We recommend this entertaining account of how to operate a service-oriented company in a cutthroat industry.

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NUTS!

This book is a must read for anyone in the business world. Herb's theories and ideas should be mirrored by anyone in or out of the airline industry.

Light, yet educational read!

Not suprisingly, this is a little different than the traditional "how to" books you might otherwise read. However, the ideas in here are creative and many were new for me. Lots of operational and communication related tips, which I found helpful. And, the book is easy to read. Since many airlines cannot find a way to make money AND achieve such high levels of customer service, Southwest (and this book) serve as a good guide to prosperity.

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Excelent buy - worth it a MILLION BUCKS

You will probably change you attitude and will want to work for SOUTHWEST after reading this book.
Excelent.
Luiz

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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