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.
A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.
Nothing kills your company's culture like layoffs.
Wild Turkey whiskey and Philip Morris cigarettes are essential to the maintenance of human life!
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.
We turned our planes around after landing and got them off again in 20 minutes back in the early days; 15 minutes in many cases. That gave us a huge cost advantage because we could do more flying in a day with a single plane than anybody else.
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.
Fight hierarchy and bureaucracy as hard as you possibly can. Don't ever let it become the master; always remember it's the servant.
Just because you don't announce your plan doesn't mean you don't have one.
Who says a lighthearted approach to business is incompatible with success?
Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.
Most people think of us as this flamboyant airline, but we're really very conservative from the fiscal standpoint.
You can't have a mid-life crisis in the airline industry because every day is a crisis.
In 1996 - when, for the fifth year in a row, we had the best record among major airlines for on-time performance and for baggage handling and the fewest complaints for the number of customers carried - we dedicated an airplane to all of our 25,000 people. We put all their names on the outside of the overhead bins.
We've always operated on the thesis that a company can have a personality, that people can be themselves, and be very successful in business at the same time.
I tell my employees that we're in the service business, and it's incidental that we fly airplanes.
I've been asked a number of times what was my proudest accomplishment when I was still very active in the day-to-day affairs of Southwest Airlines. I always said job security for our people.
The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.
I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.
