Southwest Update

In covering Southwest's holiday-seasom meltdown, I've got to say I expected at least some management heads to roll. So far, not a bit of it.

[I]n an announcement that flirts with humor and attempts to defy it, the airline this week promoted five of its senior executives to even more senior roles.

Why, the vice president of Network Planning, Adam Decaire, was promoted to senior vice president of Network Planning and Network Operations Control. He's going to need a wider business card, isn't he? And please don't worry, he went to Ohio State and didn't study accountancy.

Then there was Tony Roach. He was promoted from vice president of Customer Experience & Engagement to senior vice president of Marketing & Customer Experience. He's going to have some fun over the next few months. And no, he didn't go to the University of Texas. His alma mater is Abilene Christian University.

All hail, too, Whitney Eichinger, ascending from vice president of Culture & Engagement to senior vice president of Culture & Communications. She was at TCU and, oh, the University of Texas. But wait, it's OK. She studied "communications, journalism, and related programs."

The references to educational background refer to a letter from the Southwest pilots' union that traced the airline's problems to an in-group of executives who had accounting degrees from the University of Texas. The article suggests, though,

I feel entirely sure these are extremely competent people. By my rough calculations they have, between them, a total of 100 years working for Southwest. But is that actually a good thing? Or does it reflect the pilots' view that Southwest management is a rather closed cabal?

So now, dear Southwest customer, you must decide how you feel. Is it really a good look to react to an act of utter incompetence by promoting five longtime executives in the aftermath?

. . . Might you be slightly skeptical when Southwest insists these promotions "will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our People and Customers"?

What intrigues me is what the new executive titles reveal about current corporate culture. They all contain gaseous, jargony, interchangeable words like "Experience", "Culture", "Communications", and "Engagement", which suggests none of them is actulally in charge of anything at all. I assume that their position descriptions all read something to the effect of "maximize effective corporate cultural engagement with key stakeholder experience" or some such, and they're all paid upwards of half a million plus bonus to do it, whatever it might be.

Meanwhile, there doesn't appear to have been any change in the status of Chris Johnson, the Vice President of Ground Operations, whose memo to the Denver ramp workers telling them that if they claimed frostbite in the job, they'd need a doctor's note or be fired, started the whole meltdown. There may be some justice here, since he's clearly well below the various senior VPs of Communications Engagement and Cultural Experience in the food chain and no doubt did nothing other than he was told.

But the whole set of circumstances does provide, like what we saw at Starbuck's last week, a vignette of the new corporate gentry, farther and farther isolated from people who actually do the work or buy the product, and indeed, the current state of standardized corporate language that conceals resposibility while trivializing and even infantilizing both customers and employees.