To Be Successful, Love Your People

Week 4 Hand-in Assignment

To be successful, love your people

Southwest Airlines and SEMCO Success

Introduction

(Krohe Jr., 2010) “Any activity becomes creative,” John Updike once said, “when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” Today’s leading management trends espouse the need to give employees more autonomy, more opportunities to fully engage in their work, and more choice about how they want to work in order to benefit both the employee and the company. But these ideas, well intentioned as they are, are only Band-Aid solutions if we don’t recognize that it is a company’s fundamental operating system that must change (Krohe Jr., 2010).

Some managers are skeptical about strategies that involve a staff centered and qualitative performance orientation, in order to successfully reach organizational goals. However, there are shining examples of organizations that have achieved yearly impressive results, based on success of competitive philosophies that focus on the individual. Not only does their willingness to go out of the box reflects positively on the organization itself, it also affects and augments the relationship with and performance of their related stakeholders making up the larger business community. In this assignment, I will focus on two of those success stories.

Southwest Airlines and SEMCO are two companies that have proven to be very successful after they changed their company strategies. They have opted for a more open and modern involved company culture, which in turn has led to success. They have even become an object of study or a model for other companies. Research shows that revenues have been going up because of enhanced employee loyalty, employing a future mindset focused on their staff, believing that their employees are the real assets to the company.

What makes these companies differ from others and why are they successful? How have these strategies directly impacted their organizational culture and...