Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

"We're going to be the next Southwest Airlines"

Kelleher has talked about a time when competitors were boasting that they "We're going to be the next Southwest Airlines." The great thing about having a true competitive advantage is that by its very nature it is extremely difficult to reproduce.

One of the comments that Kelleher made about this was "But they didn't really understand who we were. Most of them did not really imitate Southwest Airlines; they ended up creating new versions of themselves."

What he's really saying here is that people believe that recreating how a company does things outwardly, will reproduce the results that a company achieves. This is completely wrong.

In the case of Southwest Airlines (LUV), and any other truly successful company, it can never be the outward things that determine the competitive advantage, it's always what the company represents within that creates the difference. The outward is simply a natural, organic extension of the inner beliefs of what a company really is.

So to copy the outward is to miss what the heart of a company is. So those that copy those things alone, could never become the type of company they're trying to emulate, because they never touch the heart of a matter.

Southwest and other successful companies have something that is the heart of who they are. So when they imitated by others, unless they start with what is within, there will never be the results and permanent changes they had hoped for.

Any company needs to know what they represent and who they are. That's really the greatest differentiator that makes them most difficult to compete against. To recreate what a company is in heart, takes a lot of time, it can't simply be copied in the techniques or strategies that a firm practices.