A Case for Bioadministration

Here at the transition point between the passing year and the New Year I will revisit the case for adoption of the bioadministration model for any large or small human organization. The specific event triggering my desire this revisit, besides it being a New Year, was the recent meltdown of Southwest Airlines as a functioning organization.

I have watched the growth of Southwest as an avid flyer from a college student at Texas Tech in Lubbock in the 1970’s to present and internally as one of my best friends rose from a baggage handler to a director of operations for the company. It was arguably the best airline in the industry bypassing the travel agents for booking, changing the operational tempo, standardizing of equipment and hedging fuel costs to name a few of its industry changing innovations.

Southwest not only navigated deregulation it continually drove the industry to align with its practices and efficiencies or fail, which many airlines did during this time. The one place no other airline caught up was in what is known in bioadministration as the organization’s soul or conscience. It’s ethos. Anyone who flew on Southwest from its inception with the hot pants and the two free adult beverages, knew that Southwest had an attitude that was woven into its success.

Interact with any human being for an hour and a close observer can say many things about that human’s philosophy of life and their attitude of relationship. With corporations if there is any ethos you can detect it is probably a part of a marketing campaign. For example, “Everyday Low Prices”. The corporation may develop an image in customers minds with marketing but that is very superficial to the organizational soul and ethos that bioadministration encourages.

Southwest has never had a first class section and every seat is the same size as every other seat. It is first come, first serve with no assigned seating. Yes, there are operational efficiencies to these policies but they very much reflect the corporate ethos of equality and preventing anyone from becoming too special. My friend who worked his way up from the bottom with no college degree often described the open nature of all the executives whose only mission was the mission...and to have fun doing it!

The co-empowerment expressed by Southwest as represented by its reformation of the industry, its serial and continuous innovation and its spunky, fun attitude from all levels of its loyal employees made Southwest an extremely profitable enterprise and a very desirable brand. Why? Not just because every job mattered and it was great fun to work there but every employee felt their value to something greater than themselves. There was a group soul that was real enough and integrated enough into every part of the company and mission that acted as the gravity holding it all in harmonious order.

Where most large business organizations are soulless and do not operate at a speed allowed by those organizations that have emotional commitment, Southwest was still a living organism whose playful creativity could also be a risk if the systemic nature of the highly committed operational tempo was first ingrained, then exploited. This historic meltdown of the leading airline in the world for decades was simply an exceptional organization ruled by it soul and ethos, violating its own organizing principal.

Many observers are blaming the outdated reservation and routing system’s software to be the cause. But that was simply a second order failure from the original failure. This all started at the Denver Airport where an excess number of employees were calling in sick over the Christmas holiday. Instead of using this issue for self inspection of an organization that may have shifted its focus to financial parameters from soul choices, the current management threatened their own necessary and productive cells in their own body with firing if they called in sick without a doctor’s note. In essence, this was a power and control response to an emotional (Christmas) and bodily (extreme weather and illness) problem. Two hundred employees at the ground level of one station quit and it shut down 75% of the airline for days.

The moral of the story is that if you are going to engage the hearts of employees and customers and design an organization around an ethos that encourages loyalty and extraordinary performance then everything must remain in alignment with the co-empowered structure or a catastrophic collapse like a living child in an emotional meltdown. Southwest broke the bond with its employees and may have killed the soul of the corporation.

Southwest Airlines changed the world in its time. So did Apple. And so did General Electric in their heyday. In fact, every industry has its living childlike creator or innovator that eventually grows up and becomes just another machine in the economy. It is hard, but it is lawful for a money making enterprise to have a heart and a soul. In fact every great advancement in economy has come from an ensouled organization.

The United States in many ways is a reflection of Southwest Airlines. We are the child-like upstart in the economy of nations that became the 800 pound gorilla of the nation state due to our reconciled national soul. Now our management (government) has decided to threaten us rather than listen to its heart and body and has most likely set in motion a systemic collapse much like Southwest Airlines.

Will we lose our soul or can we bounce back? Bioadministration will answer that question and can reintroduce choice.