Herb Kelleher Quotes

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.

The business of business is people.

If you don’t treat your own people well, they won’t treat other people well.

We have the best customer satisfaction record, based on Transportation Dept. statistics, of any airline in America, the fewest complaints filed per 100,000 passengers carried. So you’re not just getting low fares, you’re also getting wonderful customer service.

You have to have the service mentality in the sense that you subjugate your own ego, and you subjugate a large part of your own life to really helping other people, being successful on their behalf.

If the employees come first, then they’re happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.

The tragedy of our time is that we’ve got it backwards, we’ve learned to love techniques and use people.

Think small and act small, and we’ll get bigger. Think big and act big, and we’ll get smaller.

Treat your employees like customers.

We have a strategic plan. It’s called ‘doing things’.