The Southwest Airlines Way

By: Jody Hoffer Gittell

Narrated by: Anna Fields

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 US 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 executives­­, The 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, time-sensitive airline industry.

Please note: This is an historical recording. The audio quality represents the technology of the time when it was produced.

©2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (P)2005 McGraw Hill-Ascent Audio

Good despite issues with Ch 12

Overall good information. Time and time again teamwork and feeling appreciated and heard wins in business. NOTE: Weirdly static and issues with Chapter 12 after a few minutes.

Really great insight into what made/makes Southwest great

Great narration, very interesting insight into Southwests culture with a comparison to American Airlines. How they relies on relationships over technology. Half of Chapter 26 is noise and sounds like someone drowning.

Could Have Been 5 Stars

This is a great story about Southwest Airlines and how they grew to be the successful airline and business model they are. Great read for up and coming supervisors and managers.

My ONLY issue is that half way through Chapter 26 the audio goes to static. I tried deleting the download, thinking maybe it was corrupted and redownloaded it, but that didn’t work. The audio picks back up fine in Chapter 27, so you’re only really out about three and a half minutes of the book. Given that it took me forever to get around to listening to this one and it’s past the return window, I have to live with it. Just be aware if that’s a deal-breaker for you. Good book otherwise.

Not great

I was very interested in the southwest story but learned much more from podcasts. This book was very repetitive, did not contain many insights, and had no story.