SWAPA has been beating this drum to management for nearly a decade pleading with them to spend the necessary capital to prevent the ultimate consequence someday. As CEO, Gary Kelly made a conscious decision to make the less than necessary investments in tech upgrades in favor of maximizing shareholder return because, well, “our tech’s been working ok for 20 years.” While Gary’s financial acumen cannot be debated, his poor operational leadership and judgment have been demonstrated repeatedly with each meltdown and finally laid bare with the current situation we find ourselves in. A situation only exacerbated by the fact that he chose to surround himself with people who dare not disagree with him. However, while remaining the current Chairman of the Southwest Board of Directors, Gary did manage to hand over CEO reins to Bob Jordan this year before the ultimate consequence of Gary’s lack of investment in his own Company manifested itself. Meanwhile, Gary basks in the glow of a shelf full of awards from the business, finance, and investment world while they all completely ignore the internal damage he did to our Company in pursuit of those accolades. The airline darling of Wall Street who Gordon Gekko’d his own company from within through greed, ambition, and neglect for the operation itself.
If nothing else, the world now knows that SWA management embraces the words of Herb’s legacy for public relations purposes only while having completely abandoned them in deeds.
Despite negatively impacting our Denver operation in a concrete manner and humiliating SWA on a national level, this VP remains in his position and will likely do so indicating the tacit approval for his “leadership” style by SWA executives. Additionally, one need only look at last week’s viral memo from the SWA VP of Ground Ops to his workers in Denver to see how far Gary Kelly allowed this Company to deviate from the culture and principles that Herb cultivated. As Pilots, we need look no further than the string of milquetoast headquarters “leadership” we have been subjected to within our own operations stovepipe in the Company. In his two decades at the helm, Gary Kelly managed to build an organization of yes-men and yes-women around him and promoted within that organization, based on agreeability rather than competence. Rather than keeping the organization flat and lean with minimum distance between the nerve center of the organization and its executing appendages as Herb had originally designed, he added layer upon layer of bureaucratic fat, staffed by corporate automatons whose defining skills are sheltering the boss from bad news from below and never disagreeing with him. How did we get here? How did we go from the most stable and profitable airline in history to the greatest meltdown in airline history? As with most organizations, the answer can be distilled down to one word: Leadership. Actually, in our case, it’s three words: Lack of leadership. While we continue to receive saccharine corporate-communications-department-written and legal-counsel-reviewed “we’re sorry” and “I love you” meaningless and generic messages from SWA corporate executives, they obscure a genuine cancer within our Company that has been an ever-growing existential threat that must be excised before it becomes terminal. And these messages obfuscate the actual corrective action that is absolutely necessary to pull out of this graveyard spiral that our Company’s so-called leaders have placed us in. That fix is actual and tangible accountability above the front-line worker level for the first time in our recent history. It is time to have a frank discussion about the root cause of the quagmire that we find ourselves in today. That root cause has a name.
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