An Interview with Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly

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Terry Maxon & Suzanne Marta:

Southwest Airlines Co. chief executive Gary Kelly doesn’t have any offers out to buy another airline, but he expects Southwest to jump in when the consolidation fun begins.
“At some point, I think we’ll probably acquire somebody,” Mr. Kelly said in a recent discussion with Dallas Morning News business editors and reporters. “There’s bound to be a scenario that we would say, ‘That scenario out of these 10, yep, that one would work for us.’ We’d want to be prepared for that opportunity that presents itself.”
Southwest’s investment in bankrupt ATA Airlines Inc. in 2004 offers a good example of being ready, he said. Of course, the airline is well aware of the pitfalls of acquiring another carrier, a strategy it followed in 1993 when it acquired Morris Air and in 1986 when it bought Muse Air.

Perhaps, one day, Madison will be fortunate to have Southwest air service.

Top Tech Predictions For 2008

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Stephen Wellman:

Yesterday I attended the Third Annual SNS New York Dinner, a gathering of tech professionals and investors at the famous Waldorf=Astoria Hotel hosted by futurist Mark Anderson. As usual, Anderson stirred controversy with a big dose of his high-powered brain candy.
Anderson opened the evening with a set of interlocking observations about the current global landscape. First, Anderson said that the world will face two crises as it transitions into the new year. The first is a climate crisis and the second a financial liquidity crisis.
“We must now agree that the climate crisis is true. We are past the time for debate. But now we need a rapid response,” he said. “What if the global climate crisis is non-linear? There are no straight lines in nature,” he said. Anderson agreed with Albert Gore’s recent remarks that humanity is at war with the planet, but he reminded SNS attendees, as he did at the last two dinners, that there is lots of money to be made by figuring out to end humanity’s war against nature.
Anderson predicted that the West’s good will with China would come to an end in 2008, in no small part due to China’s role as a massive polluter (which the world will notice at the 2008 Olympics) but also because China has taken its current role in the global economy as far as it can. Soon China will have to grow up and evolve.
High oil prices, which Anderson has spotlighted at the last two SNS dinners, will continue to climb. “$70 a barrel for oil is the new floor,” he said. “We’ll see another run to $100 a barrel by December 31 next year, or shortly afterwards.”

Workshop of the World – Fine Arts Division

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James Fallows:

Which brings us to the Dafen “art factory village” outside Shenzhen, in southern China. I had heard a lot about Dafen, including in a very good story by Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune early this year. (The story seems no longer to be on the Tribune’s site. For reference, it was published on February 13, 2007.) But only this weekend did I see it, guided by Liam Casey, the Irish “Mr. China” I described a few months ago in an article about Shenzhen’s more conventional factories. Now that I’ve seen it — my lord!

Why aren’t We all Good Samaratins?

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TED Talks:

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Through psychological experiments and a story of the Santa Cruz Strangler, he shows how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 13:13.)

Cyberwar Comes of Age

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Adam Elkus:

The digitized specter of cyberwar is haunting the boardrooms, barracks, and law offices of America. China’s audacious September 2007 infiltration of secure Pentagon networks and government servers in several other nations has powerfully demonstrated that cyberwar’s moment has arrived. Cybersecurity analysts have estimated that 120 different nations are working to evolve cyberwar capabilities. Most of today’s current cyberwar operations involve hackers probing civilian and military networks for vulnerabilities and restricted information, operations that focus less on disruption than recon and surveillance.

Venti Capitalists

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PJ O’Rourke:

Taylor Clark ought to know how Starbucks got its roc-like wingspan. That’s the tale by which we want to be spellbound. Clark quotes a 1997 Larry King interview with Howard Schultz, the company’s chairman, where Schultz outlines what should have been the plot of Clark’s book:



“People weren’t drinking coffee. … So the question is, How could a company create retail stores where coffee was not previously sold, … charge three times more for it than the local doughnut shop, put Italian names on it that no one can pronounce, and then have six million customers a week coming through the stores?”

12th Annual Lump of Coal Awards

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Chuck Jaffe:

At most holiday feasts, the second helping is more filling than the first.
That should be the case in my annual buffet of fund buffoonery, the 12th annual Lump of Coal Awards, recognizing managers, executives, firms, watchdogs and other fund-industry types for action, attitude, behavior or performance that is misguided, bumbling, offensive, disingenuous, reprehensible or just plain stupid.
Last week, I highlighted 10 award winners who deserved nothing more than coal in their holiday stocking this year. Here are the rest:
Failing to get out the vote: Managers of the Blue funds. The tiny Blue funds allow Democrats to invest in companies that “act blue” and “give blue.” Beyond that, management claims to be “actively engaging in shareholder resolutions and proxy voting in an effort to promote increased transparency in corporate political giving.”

How Safe Is Your Salad?

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Carl Nagin:

Late in August 2006, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta began investigating cases of severe food poisoning reported by health officials in 26 states and one Canadian province. Over the next six weeks, a rare and particularly virulent strain of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 sickened more than 200 people across North America, hospitalizing half of them, some with severe kidney damage, and killing two elderly women and a child. For epidemiologists, the outbreak presented a breakthrough because a DNA-fingerprinting system enabled CDC investigators to trace the source of the infections from clusters of cases nationwide.
Bacteria in stool samples of hospitalized patients were genetically matched to pathogens in packaged, “ready to eat” Dole brand spinach that they had recently purchased and consumed. Further, product codes on the bags indicated that the contaminated greens had been processed during one shift on Aug. 15 at a plant in San Juan Bautista then owned and operated by Natural Selection Foods. The company’s records showed that the spinach had been harvested from four fields in Monterey and San Benito counties.

Cattle rustling on the rise in California

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George Raine:

The other day, two young heifer calves were stolen from a dairy in Tulare County. The thieves drove them to Kings County, where they apparently discovered to their chagrin that the animals were branded.
That would make selling them difficult. If they tried to sell the calves at a livestock auction, the state brand inspectors would want to see proof of ownership. Cops on the case think the thieves figured they were toast. So, they simply tossed the animals out of their car in downtown Hanford, in front of the flour mill at Sixth and Green streets, and drove away. A car came by and struck and killed one of the calves. The other one wandered a mile away, ending up in a man’s front yard.
There was weariness in Greg Lawley’s voice as he told the story. “They have no regard for animals,” said Lawley, chief of the Bureau of Livestock Identification at the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
“Makes you sick,” Lawley said of cattle rustling redux.