Leading with LUV

Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett wrote this as a dialogue about Southwest Airlines, where Barrett rose from Herb Kelleher's legal secretary to president. LUV is the airline's ticker symbol and its internal shorthand for the culture Barrett describes. The book is a statement of servant leadership doctrine illustrated with Southwest practice.

The substantive claim is an ordering: employees first, customers second, shareholders third. Barrett argues that this is not a moral preference but a causal chain, since employees who are treated well produce customer service that generates the returns shareholders receive. She describes the specific practices: hiring for attitude and training for skill, recognising individual employees by name in company communications, allowing front-line staff discretion to resolve customer problems, and refusing customers whose behaviour toward staff is abusive.

The book is short, conversational and uncritical. It attributes Southwest's financial performance to culture without engaging the structural explanations, which include a single aircraft type, point-to-point routing, secondary airports, a fuel hedging programme that saved billions in the 2000s, and a labour cost advantage that has since eroded. Southwest's subsequent operational failures, particularly the 2022 scheduling collapse, complicate the picture further. Read it for Barrett's account of how a culture was maintained deliberately, and look elsewhere for why the airline made money.