Herb Kelleher

And we're still having a very positive culture conversation, Robert, about, hey, we've been able to keep our culture.

One of my heroes, and as I was in sales and I was out there calling on people, being curious, is I called on Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines.

And I met with Herb, spent about two hours with Herb.

And what I remember about Herb is at the time, they had 2,500 team members.

Herb Kelleher, founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, fired a customer in 60 seconds because the customer is not always right in email.

You know, there's a story in a book called Nuts, which two authors wrote about Southwest Airlines back in the 90s, about a customer the people in Southwest's customer relations department had a nickname for.

They called her Pin Pal because she wrote in after every single flight that she took, and she took a lot of them.

Then one day, her latest letter came in with the usual list of complaints, and the customer relations people had finally had enough.

So they did something smart.

They sent it upstairs to the founder and CEO, Herb Kelleher, with a sticky note on it that said, this one's yours.

Kelleher read it, and about 60 seconds later, he'd written his reply.

And here it is, word for word.

That was a top three pick in my head.

So Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest, was a signalist in the way you've just described.

He, originating from his own enormous personality and interest in people, made an enormous investment to try to understand where people were at, what's going on.

And then he built a system to combine that desire into like a second brain, a superpower that he could then act upon all sorts of things, birthdays and anniversaries, but also health issues or children or so many things that could be acted upon in this timely, superb way.

You fast forward now another 20-plus years.

Herb Kelleher is gone.

For a long time, he was on the board.

He was able to inject that spirit into the company.

Yeah, so there's this concept I call convergence versus divergence, and the companies that diverge and stay diverged are the ones that continue to endure and get better.

Southwest was the epitome of that, the poster child of that for how many years? Almost 50 years, right, under Herb Kelleher? And then, you know, he died and then someone else took over and then they put someone in the last few years.

And this person is converging.

He's saying, oh, we must go back to the way the industry works and you must have a ticket for your seat.