The Southwest Airlines Way - Paperback

by Jody Hoffer Gittell (Author)

"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

Back Jacket

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

Author Biography

Jody Hoffer Gittell is an assistant professor of management at Brandeis University and faculty member of the MIT Global Airline Industry Program. She focuses on human resources and operations management, and frequently presents the results of her work to managers, researchers, and policymakers.