I don’t think it’s so much a ‘Texas’ issue as much as it is other problems. One could easily say the same thing you just said about every airlines’ management in every part of the country where they are headquartered. It’s not the location, it’s the PEOPLE. It’s human beings.

There are incompetent people everywhere. Get rid of those incompetent people in management, and many of your problems will likely go away. Fire the brown-nosers who are good at one thing, brown-nosing, and bring in the go-getters who can get chit done. Apart of this might have to do with southwest’s recruiting culture as to who they hire into management positions. They probably need to change their hiring practices completely. Revamp the system. But I could easily say this for any airline’s management staff. Not just SWA. And I wouldn’t blame the location for that. I lived in Texas for 7 years. I’m very familiar with that state and the culture and mindset many Texans have. But how do we know that ‘Texas’ is the reason for Southwest’ woes?

I would surmise that southwest has probably hired people from all over the country, not just locally from around the DFW area, to work at headquarters. The real problem that many companies suffer from, are ‘lifers’ in management/office cubicle positions who get so dug into their positions at their place of work, that they start to follow company bureaucracy more than being an independent thinker and they are no longer capable of effecting positive change, innovation, etc. The ‘careerist’ mindset is very strong the higher up the chain you go. Not trying to rag on senior employees in many companies, but these careerists get burned out and they lose that drive they once had. Many of them become over the hill burnouts and they stop trying to make things better for the organization they work for. They’re just coasting until retirement. Seen it too much. Dealt with this more times than I care to remember in a previous aviation job (non-airline). It frustrated the hell out of me. Some things I couldn’t change as it was beyond my control, but some things I could. They learn to accept status quo on many things. They learn to climb the ladder via ‘brown nosing’ and how to be ‘likeable’ over other more important things. I’ve seen it before where sometimes younger ones come in, and, though they may have less experience, they are enthusiastic and have a lot of energy and they shake things up a little bit. They try to make changes, and it turned out good for the company. With lifers, eventually things can get so bad with their incompetence that it trickles all the way down to the lower level employees and the organization starts to become poisoned by their mismanagement/incompetence, etc. usually things will just continue to get worse because incompetence usually breeds incompetence.

It’s not until someone comes along and shakes things up and kicks out the toxic sludge that is dragging the company down is when real change occurs. I’ve been pretty lucky to have witnessed this type of thing happen in 2 companies I’ve worked in, both in aviation. Without better leaders who came in at the right time, I’m positive both companies would have just continued on a downward trajectory until they failed completely.