Southwest Airlines ft. Herb Kelleher

7 leadership lessons from the airline CEO who put employees first and still made Southwest the most profitable airline in history.

With Herb Kelleher

"The business schools teach you to put shareholders first, then customers, then employees. We did it backward. We put employees first. That's why we beat the business schools."

Herb Kelleher, on the episode

Herb Kelleher co-founded Southwest Airlines in 1967 with a napkin sketch in a San Antonio bar. The concept was simple: cheap, short-haul flights between Texas cities. The execution was radical: a culture so employee-centered that Southwest became the only consistently profitable airline in American history through five decades of industry collapses. Kelleher drank Wild Turkey with pilots. He showed up at headquarters dressed as Elvis. He settled a trademark dispute with an arm-wrestling match. Underneath the personality was one of the most disciplined operators in business. This is his story — and the specific principles that made Southwest's culture unreplicable even by competitors with five times the budget.