But stockholders care about substance as well as style.
And Southwest pays dividend by sticking to one strategy: Southwest Airlines has been so enormously successfully because its low cost enables it to charge low fare.
Low cost is the soul of our existence, and we know it.
We spend as much time arguing whether we should spend 25 dollars versus 7 for something as we do whether it should be 25 million versus 23 million, you know, for an aircraft.
It paid off. For example, at the 93 annual meeting, Southwest declared a stock split and a 7 percent increase in dividends.
But that philosophy, says Dallas stockbroker and business analyst David Johnson, grows out of Southwest's unusual place in the transportation business.
It's an airline which competes against the car.
There's an argument that Southwest Airline isn't an airline, and it's not in the convention of, you know, American, Delta, United...that sort of thing, truly more like a bus company.
Bus company, in that it's frequent, it's cheap. The competition, er, is either a couch or, you know, a good sturdy Buick.
So just from the get-go, it's a quick, efficient airline. But again, it's not a conventional airline.
And if Southwest's business is unorthodox, its notion of corporate culture is just as novel.
Colleen Barret says employees believe in an identifiable Southwest spirit, which Berret's 60-person culture committee seeks to preserve.
Now the bigger that we grow, and the more spread out that our system becomes, and thus the further away from Dallas that our employees are based.
I grew increasingly concerned that they wouldn't have a real sense of history.
In the beginning, we just hired very spirited people who were warriors, and who banded together.
We now make a very concerted effort to hire a very definite-profiled type person.
And we probably spend more time on hiring than we do any other single thing at SouthWest.
How much of that is an outgrowth of Herb Kelleher's personality?
I think that the personality, the spirit, the culture certainly emanates from Herb, but if Herb were gone tomorrow, I don't think it would stop.
And I'm quite comfortable that our employees would... just...almost...uprise if there were any drastic or dramatic change. I don't think they're tolerate it.
Herb Kellerher says Southwest is trying to refute almost the entire history of humankind by not letting success lead to the kind of pride, which "goeth before a fall" in revenues.
And more often than not, they're doing it with a laugh and one eye on the bottom line.