The Southwest Airlines Way

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071458271 ISBN 13: 9780071458276

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 2005

"If you look at Southwest Airlines, and I admire what they do, they've been the most successful airline in the industry."

--Gerard Arpey, CEO, American Airlines

"Through extensive research Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times."

--Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry Program

In an industry with losses in the billions, Southwest Airlines has an unbroken string of 31 consecutive years of profitability. The Southwest Airlines Way examines how the company uses high-performance relationships to create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees. It then goes further to show how any company can foster these powerful cooperative relationships and explains how to:

• Lead with credibility and caring
• Invest in frontline leaders
• Hire and train for relational competence
• Use conflicts to build relationships
• Make unions its partners, not its adversaries
• Build relationships with its suppliers

From the Back Cover:

Management lessons from the world's most profitable airline

"As a former Southwest insider, I often wondered why other organizations couldn't duplicate the business model. Anyone who wants to understand how it works should read this book."

--Libby Sartain, Senior VP of Human Resources, Yahoo

"Professor Gittell has tackled one of the hottest and most important topics in business circles today--why some airlines continually fly high over the economic wreckage of the rest of the industry."

---Thomas Winkelmann, VP-The Americas, Lufthansa German Airlines

"Through extensive research Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times."

--Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry Program

Fortune magazine calls Southwest Airlines "the most successful airline in history." In an industry that regularly loses billions of dollars, Southwest has had 31 consecutive years of profitability. The Southwest Airlines Way reveals the secret to Southwest's remarkable success--high performance relationships--and it creates enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among Southwest employees. Based on Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell's eight years of field research, this book explores Southwest's innovative policies, strategies, and techniques, showing how these methods can be implemented in any organization, and explains how to:

* Lead with credibility and caring * Invest in frontline leaders * Hire and train for relational competence * Use conflicts to build relationships * Encourage mutual respect among employees, managers, unions, and suppliers

About the Author:

JODY HOFFER GITTELL IS A PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She serves as Executive Director of the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative, bringing practitioners and researchers together to transform organizational relationships for high performance. She also serves as Chief Scientific Officer of Relational Coordination Analytics Inc., offering measurement, evaluation and visualization of relational coordination networks to organizations seeking to improve their performance. To learn more visit rcrc.brandeis.edu and rcanalytic.com.

Dr. Gittell's research explores how coordination by front-line workers contributes to quality and efficiency outcomes in service settings. She has developed a theory of relational coordination, proposing that work is most effectively coordinated through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, and demonstrating how organizations can support relational coordination through the design of their work systems.

Gittell received her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management, her MA from The New School and her BA from Reed College, and taught for six years at the Harvard Business School before joining the faculty of Brandeis University. She has served as Chair of the Board for Families First Health and Support Center, as MBA Program Director at the Brandeis Heller School, and as Acting Director of the MIT Leadership Center. She currently serves on the boards of Reed College, the Labor and Employment Relations Association and the Endowment for Health. She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with her husband Ross and their daughters Rose and Grace. Print this