Capitalism, Purpose And Servant Leadership: Case Study

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i Gary, how you doing? Ken Kemper, Captain, Flight Operations. Three weeks ago, Professor Randy Gibb, who is the Dean of the Business School at Grand Canyon University, gave a lecture to the business college entitled ‘Conscious, Capitalism, Purpose and Servant Leadership’ and essentially it’s when a company strives to make a profit ethically with a greater good in mind. Southwest, rightfully so, is held up as the shining example of a company who does conscious capitalism right. And they stressed it was because of our philosophy of: Employees first, Customers second, Shareholders third.

Now, the question I have: is this still the leadership teams guiding philosophy? Because there seems to be a growing perception among the frontline Employees
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As you all know, I’ve been here for a long time and know most of our large Shareholders and the way that I learned it at Southwest and the way that we do it to this day is that our Employees come first. We are in very intense Customer Service business where we are making the product as our Customers are experiencing it. And I 'll just do a quick contrast. Mike is leading a lot of efforts for us but one is on the hospitality effort. And I 'll just do a quick contrast to Amazon.com. And under the assumption that everybody here is familiar with Amazon, I 've used Amazon for, I don 't know, 20 years. I have never talked to one person at Amazon, ever. And that 's their whole business model. They make it so that the only way that you can deal with them that I 'm aware of. I’m sure you can get somebody on the phone but for a long time I couldn 't find a phone number. So they want you to either email or transact through their …show more content…
And said a different way, we don 't exist in Southwest Airlines to make sure that each one of us is happy. We 're here and our purpose is to serve our Customers, but I would just want to qualify that by saying that the way I think about it, as a leader for Southwest Airlines is, I think of you all as a Customer also. And, of course, Colleen for years used the phrase internal customers so none of that has changed. The Employees come first so that we can take very good care of our Customers. We take real good care of our Customers and we have a good business then everything else is going to take care of itself and that has absolutely not

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