How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all the other airlines follow). In a recent press release, their CEO Bob Jordan shared the following: We are currently […]

3 Principles of Leading Under Conditions of Uncertainty

Premise: We are entering a phase where there is a lot of uncertainty. There is a consensus building up about an impending recession. There is a lot of flux within businesses. There are some sectors that are laying off people and at the same time struggling to find the right people to hire. The general tendency of the people towards work is shifting. Some want the flexibility of working from wherever and whenever and some want the benefit of the serendipity of bumping into colleagues at the water-coolers. On top of all of these are the new capabilities that technology, […]

A Leader’s Super Power: Delivering Unprovoked Positive Antecedents!

I was reading a blog post written recently by Adam Voigt about UPA’s and I wanted to share that with all of my readers. Adam is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner and a highly successful Principal.  Earning his first Principalship at the age of 35, Adam has personally led full school turnarounds and also the design and establishment of a brand new school as its inaugural Principal. His audience is primarily school teachers and school Principals and maybe me. I find that a lot of what he talks about can also be applied to the workplace, irrespective of […]

Leadership and Happiness

One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context. While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new at all. There is a lot of good research that have found that […]

A Framework for High Performance Leadership

Premise: I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of their own challenges and how to solve them by sharing an insight that is either original or is non-obvious has significant impact. I agree with his analysis and also the kind of impact that he shares this can have on someone’s behaviour (Buying or otherwise). The challenge with this is that creating content that can have this kind of an […]