You won’t find a more challenging way to make a buck than in the airline industry. Against long odds, Herb Kelleher, the chairman emeritus of Southwest, has managed to make billions of bucks in this gladiator’s ring of the business world.
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flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/Scott Beale
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The conservative business discipline of Southwest has served the company well: Stick with one airplane type; stick to U.S. routes; stick with not serving any meals. But Kelleher has had to defend its unorthodox approach for years. (Stellar results have been his best defense.)
Looking to 2015, I thought it would be a good time to revisit Kelleher’s maverick motto on strategic planning:
“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
I found an interview from 2004 in which Kelleher explains his simple saw:
“We’ve never done the long-range planning that is customary in many businesses. When planning became big in the airline community, one of the analysts came up to me and said, ‘Herb, I understand you don’t have a plan.’ I said that we have the most unusual plan in the industry: Doing things. That’s our plan. What we do by way of strategic planning is we define ourselves and then we redefine ourselves.”
Yes, think about the future. Yes, make plans for new markets, products, and services. But don’t overthink it.
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