The commercial airline industr... free essay sample

The commercial airline industry has grown and changed tremendously over the last four or five decades. Southwest has many strengths and weaknesses, but every company has their strengths and weaknesses. Southwest can safely say that they have many things that they do that are not used in most other airlines. This includes; not charging extra for baggage or fees for changing travel schedules, and offering a sizable amount of in-flight entertainment. The company also only hires candidates that have certain traits, attitudes, and behaviors. They also send their new recruits to their own university. I believe that Southwest is a company that caters to families. To start, Southwests employees are a strength to the company because having employees who have certain attitudes can be a great thing for any company. The hiring process that Southwest employs is that the employees should be a good team player, have a good sense of humor, and treat others with respect. We will write a custom essay sample on The commercial airline industr or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The Southwest flight attendants cater to a family-based style because they have a good sense of humor and treat others with respect. This can show children that Southwest is a good option to choose when they grow older and have families of their own. I believe that this is a competitive advantage for Southwest because having good employees will make your customers happy and they will keep coming back. Furthermore, I would say that their advertising campaigns are the best among the other airline companies in the industry. The bags fly free advertising that they have done is great for their business. It helped them in the recent recession of 2008-2009 and it will continue to help when times of financial recession occur. The company uses advertising to show special fare sales to fill seats that would otherwise be empty. I think that this overall would lower the price of tickets sold for flights and helps with having lower operating costs per customer-per mile. Moreover, the bags fly free campaign, to me looks good to families who want to travel around the country, because they dont have to pay for their checked bags. Southwest helps families who have small kids by allowing their parents to check car seats and strollers for free. This can help families who might be poor but need to travel to a funeral or other event across the country. The sizeable amount of electronics or things to do during a flight helps keep the kids in line too. Non-stop or point-to-point flights cost more but there is no need to use a hub for the flights, so there is less travel time. This system caters to families, because parents with children dont want to be waiting at an airport terminal for their plane to arrive where one of their kids may get bored and go stir crazy. This kind of flight can cater to business people too because like families, they dont want to wait either. In addition, the companys use of one aircraft type can help them save on maintenance costs and costs with training the employees that work on and maintain the aircraft. It can save the company money because the company needs less warehousing space for replacement parts. I think they have a partnership with Boeing, and having a partnership with an airplane manufacturing company can give you advantages, and in Southwests case, they get Boeings newest airplanes first. As well as having only one type of aircraft, it could also be a weakness because while Southwest Airlines has international flights, they would need to probably buy bigger aircraft to fly overseas. They acquired AirTran, but the amount of passengers Southwest gets from international travel shown in the case is a small amount towards dominating the international areas they fly. To go along with the weakness that they are not flying internationally, they do have flights to places nearby like places in the Caribbean and Mexico, but they dont really get any international customers. On the other hand, this could be better for them because they can focus on the United States and its customers there. This is in fact what I think they are doing, and they are dominating the airline ind ustry in the US. Having longer international flights would also mean that they may have to go back to the drawing board for how they are going to serve food and beverages on the plane, or tell its customers that there is a new practice for international flights. They would also probably need to change their operating strategy too, because of new languages, cultures, and laws and regulations they would need to deal with. Another weakness is the fact that Southwest has only one class of seating available to its passengers. This isnt bad for families since they dont really want to sit in business class seating with their children. Business people who are traveling and may have their trip paid for would rather have a seat in a business or first-class area than in the coach area, so they would have enough room for work, and wouldnt be bothered by children. I think that business and first-class seating would probably gain additional revenue for the company even if they had only a few seats per flight. In fact, purchasing tickets for Southwest may be a hard task to overcome for some people because depending on if you are booking flights connecting to other airline companies, you may have to go through a travel agency. Going t hrough travel agencies will cost more because of the fees that go with it. I think that if I were to do it this way it would give me a hard time finding the right flight. Also, traveling with Southwest you need to check in 24 hours before your flight to get your boarding position, and it seemed to me to be on a first come first serve basis. So, if you were a little behind, or slow with the process, you would get a boarding position where you would have fewer seats to choose from when boarding your plane the next day. Southwest also has a pretty bad weakness for families, and that is the fact that they dont provide passengers with transfer services. Again, families would have a hard time moving all over the airport with their children. Moving around the airport also takes time, so if a customer wanted to book a flight with transfers, they would want to leave at least 30 minutes in between transfers to get to baggage claim and onto their next flight. This also leaves less time for a meal, snack, or something else before their next flight. Southwests key elements to its culture, is the fact that way back in the early days of the company when Herb Kelleher took the role of CEO, he did many things to help the companys culture become what it is today. He would make it a point to work with the companys employees and find the weaknesses and problems within the company. As part of a quote, he said, You have to treat your employees like your customers. Employees come first, and since you treat your employees like customers they will treat the companys customers well. In this way, you would be benefiting both your employees and customers, instead of just your customers. I think that overall this is a great competitive strategy for them because working side-by-side with your employees makes them feel better. To me, I think most employees like that kind of boss. To conclude, most of the strengths of Southwest are towards families because that is the kind of company they want to be. Its not a bad thing but business people should be involved too. Overall, I think that Southwest Airlines will continue to flourish and become an improved company in the next decade.

Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper Essay Example

Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper Essay Example Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper Paper Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper Paper The American writer Henry James wrote a great number of stories in which the role of the main character was a woman. He was very interested in the femenine world and this is the reason why he tried to explore what defines feminity in termes of genre. I have chosen two short stories about this author: Daisy Miller (1878) and Washington Square (1880). Their main characters are both heroines and they also have a lot of points in common but I have analysed the different techniques that James used to design the female characters of Daisy Miller and Catherine Sloper respectively because the different procedures meant inevitably different literary results. In a first attempt to analyse Daisy and Catherine we realise that they can be defined by opposite adjectives: Daisy is spirited, independent, well meaning, young, beautiful, flirtatious but also ignorant, shallow and provincial; on the other hand, Catherine is bad-looking, shy, plain and painfully. Consequently we could consider them highly distinct but, in fact, they are the one and the other women who have to face their reality by fighting against oppresive forces: Daisy against social conventions and Catherine against her tyrannical father. However in a deeper analysis we can observe that what becomes tremendously fascinating is the different methods that James develop to create the characters of Daisy and Catherine. The narrator of Daisy Miller presents the events as true. The method of the distant, first-person narrator who knows but is not knowledgeable, who is interested but not involved, has the effect of setting the whole story up within the framework of a piece of gossip. This scheme can be considered as ironic because the story itself is about gossip: the different things that one hears about people, the assumptions and prejudices one makes about them based on the things one hears and the difficulty of judging character based on the stories one hears. It provides a narrator who acts as an observer to the events described in the story rather than an omniscient narrator who informs the reader of the thoughts of the characters. In other words, James focuses on the external details which offers the reader a realistic perspective of the characters and leaves moral judgement to the readers. After a brief description of setting the story of Daisy Miller begins with an I. The I refers to the unnamed character who acts as a first person limited omniscient narrator limited to the point of view of Winterbourne. As a consequence, the reader cannot view all the descriptions as all-knowing and finite. In other words, the narrator is not an absolute authority. In order to reinforce this idea James uses intelligently verbs such as seem, or imagine to talk about Winterbournes opinions, to emphasize that we are provided all the information through his particular perspective. As Winterbourne, we as readers never know the real feelings of Daisy because James made an effort to provide only external elements. What is the opinion that the readers can have about the character of Daisy? It really depends on the particular interpretations of the different readers because we never have evidences about her innocence or her guilty in the story. At the end Winterbourne neither is assured about Daisys personality. In this context, the character of Daisy emerges without any effort from the writer of analysing her thoughts or feelings. We are never told the story from Daisys perspective so we can only have a piece of the story. Therefore the portrait of the young American lady who is travelling around Europe with her mother and her little brother is completely drawn by the others, by society and most particularly, by Winterbourne. When Daisy talks to Winterbourne or to Giovanelli her words do not seem especially relevant for the development of the story and it seems more important the way in which she is judged than the way in which she thinks about herself and her circumstances. As a conclusion it can be stated that in Daisy Miller the female character is designed by the others, that is, by comparison to the rest of people: the readers can not know what Daisy things or feels indeed because their perspective is limited to the people around Daisy and to their social prejudices. Now that I have analysed the method that Henry James uses to describe and to develop the character of Daisy it is the turn of Catherine Sloper. Mark Le Fanu points out how Henry James draws a complex character in his main character, Catherine: Character, necessarily, is depicted from outside and inside. Outside, that is to say, the impression made by Catherine on the other personages in the story; and inside, the impression made on Catherine as the events take their resolute course. In this sense, we can roundly say that Daisy and Catherine are particularly different. In Daisy the narrator emphasises a description from the outside, only taking into account the opinion and the thoughts of the rest of characters but not Daisy in itself. When faced with a problem, Catherines preference is to solve it internally, as illustrated in a conversation between her father and Aunt Almond: And, meanwhile, how is Catherine taking it? As she takes everything -as a matter of course. Doesnt she make a noise? Hasnt she made a scene? She is not scenic. Moreover, the readers are inevitably waiting for her to start standing up for herself.

Personality Theory in Organizational Behavior Assignment

Personality Theory in Organizational Behavior - Assignment Example Some people will be very good at communicating with clients, people within the company, and competitors. These people should be assigned to tasks that involve outreach to customers or other businesses. Other people might be less extroverted. Putting them onto, say, account management and debt collection might not be wise. Similarly, accountants will need to make sure their workers are conscientious, undoubtedly the most important element of accounting. But if workers have difficulties with conscientiousness, this isn't the end of the world. Training can be one solution. Another solution can be putting more time into infrastructure: Making procedures simpler and less ambiguous, providing managerial support and monitoring, etc. Perhaps the same people who have difficulties with conscientiousness are those extroverted people who will be great handling communication. The key insight of personality theory is that everyone has different skills and that this is not a problem but a boon to organizations. Like everything in business, organizations simply have to adapt to this as a fact of the market and of life. Companies that do this well thrive, companies that don't die. Accountants will need to work with a wide variety of personality types that vary along the Big Five axes. 2. Luthans et al examined hundreds of managers in different industries and found that all of their skills and job descriptions boiled down to four roles: Management, communication, human resource management, and networking (Robbins). Management is traditional managerial roles such as distributing tasks, planning, and decision-making. Communication is paperwork and exchanging information. Human resource management is motivating, hiring, firing, etc. (It is the least important task according to Luthans et al; Robbins). And networking is interacting mostly with others, but also inside the company in terms of socializing and engaging in office.