#56 The Biography of Herb Kelleher

**David Senra** (0:00)
One plan, no matter how well laid, couldn't possibly respond to all of these situations. This is why Kelleher does not put much stock in traditional strategic planning. His concern is that writing something down in a plan makes it gospel. When the plan becomes gospel, it's easy for people to become rigid in their thinking and less open to new, perhaps off-the-wall ideas. Kelleher explains it this way. Reality is chaotic. Planning is ordered and logical. The two don't square well with one another. When USAIR pulls out of six cities in California, they don't call me and tell me they're going to do that. Now, if we have established a big strategic plan that is approved by our officers and the board of directors, I would have to go to the officers and the board and tell them that we want to deviate from this plan. They would want to know why I want to buy six more airplanes. The problem is, we'd analyze it and debate its merits for three months, instead of getting the airplanes, taking over the gates, and dominating California. The meticulous nitpicking that goes on in most strategic planning processes creates a mental straitjacket that becomes disabling in an industry where things change radically from one day to the next.
When a financial analyst chided Kelleher about not having a strategic plan, he said, we do have a plan. When she asked what it was, his response was vintage Kelleher. It's called doing things.
Okay, so that is from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Nuts!, Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. So I wasn't planning on doing this book anytime soon. It kind of jumped ahead in my queue because a few weeks ago, Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, just passed away. And he's one of the most fascinating people that I've ever heard give an interview. And this book, although not a biography of Herb, he worked closely with the authors. It was published in the early 1990s. And it just gives us a good idea of how he thinks about business, which I think is the core of what we're trying to get to on this podcast.
Before we begin, jump into the podcast, though. I do want to share a quick story from another book that I'm currently reading. I've been immersed in the mind of Steve Jobs lately. So I've read two more books about Apple in the past two weeks. And I'm also in the middle of taking notes on all of Steve Jobs' appearances at the All Things D conference.
And the story that I want to talk to you about real quick, it comes from the book Creative Selection, Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. And the author of this book is actually the programmer that worked on creating the Safari browser and the keyboard software for the first iPhone. So the context of the story that I'm going to read to you is what Steve's... Basically, Steve Jobs was giving direction to the creation of Safari. At this point, we're talking early 2000s. They were... Internet Explorer was the browser on the Mac. And he wanted to create his own browser. And what I found fascinating is when he was giving the direction to the team, he had them focus on one thing and one thing only.
And in the terms of creating Safari, that one thing was speed. And so let me go ahead and go to the book and read you the story.
So the author is actually going to be telling a story, but he's using it as a metaphor. So he's talking about one of the most famous football coaches of all time, Vince Lombardi. And you're going to see how he ties this together and compares Vince and Steve in the context of how they were creating Safari at the time. So it says, When Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone 11 straight seasons without a winning record. And after winning only one of 12 games the previous year, upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression.
So he gathers all of his players in one room and he's giving them a speech. And he's doing it in front of a blackboard. He picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak. Now this direct quote from Lombardi. Gentlemen, he said, we have a great deal of ground to cover. We're going to do things a lot differently than have been done here before. We're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it. Because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in that process, we will catch excellence.