Competitive Strategy In Southwest Airlines: Porter's Approach

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases,” observed Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung wasn’t thinking about strategic management when he wrote that passage.

There is no best way to formulate business strategy(s) and to adopt an approach, as many factors are key determinants of which strategy approach to be adopted.

Many factors are involved and impose sometimes the strategies’ approach that is thought to be the perfect one for the organization.

The company size for example, when the company gets very big and has different locations in many places especially international companies, then leaders of headquarters will not leave the future of a company to units managers

Porters (1985).

Obviously, the Porter’s competitive strategy is applied in Southwest airlines through a cost leader strategy of low fare air transportation to its customers, implemented by very well trained employees, focusing on adopted culture of delivering a sense of warmth, friendliness and good time atmosphere.

In practice all strategies making walks on two feet, one deliberate and the other emergent, Cynthia A. Montgomery and Michael E. Porter P410.this put the umbrella strategy (deliberate emergent) on the top of the most adopted business strategies. In our case study the organization of Southwest Airlines is best described as an upside-down organizational structure, therefore, the front line personnel are key people in planning the business strategies (emergent strategy) of the company based on their expertise and the direct involvement with executing and delivering the business strategies, while the upper management is at the bottom and supports the front line employees, unlike the traditional strategy making (deliberate strategy) where the top leaders play the major role in setting and planning the goals and strategies of a company while the middle and operations managements execute the planned