The Southwest Airlines Way : Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance

Management lessons from the world's most profitable airline

"If you want to understand how one organization can change the competitive rules of the game for an entire industry, read this book."--James L. Heskett, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School and Coauthor of The Value-Profit Chain

Fortune magazine calls Southwest Airlines "the most successful airline in history." With a market value greater than the rest of the U.S. airline industry combined, Southwest Airlines is an amazing company with amazing management practices. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with frontline Southwest employees, managers, and senior executives­­The Southwest Airlines Way explains how Southwest's relationship-based performance principles can be adopted by managers in any industry, with dramatic results.

Full of frontline tales of Southwest's innovative management style, this compelling book explains how Southwest's relentless focus on high-performance relationships and its people-management practices have been the key to its unparalleled success in the airline industry. It reveals how any organization willing to invest the time and effort can learn from Southwest's management style by creating shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect among management, employees, and suppliers. This is the secret of how Southwest consistently outperforms its competitors in the high-pressure, timesensitive airline industry.

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.