Read the two articles attached below and view the Clips from Lean on Me.

Respond to these questions:

• Compare (how are these managers alike) and contrast (how are these managers different) the management/leadership style of the three individuals (Herb Kelleher, Ron Eden and Joe Clark) highlighted.
• Identify the manager/leader that you believe would generate the most commitment from employees. Support your choice.
• Discuss the appropriateness of each manager/leaders styles related to the nature of the business, business environment as well as concepts presented in class and/or text.
• Considering the mission (purpose) of the organization (you may have to make assumptions critical thinking), identify and discuss two or three factors about the organization, (structure, employees, practices), the business climate (environmental factors) and/or the manager/leaders ability to leverage resources contributing to the success of each organization.
• Identify and discuss what we can learn from each of these managers/leaders.
• Synthesize (combine ideas) and form a thesis statement (statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved) as to what you have learned.

Read this Book Review: Flights of fancy allow Southwests profits to soar

Read this News Article: Mr. Eden Profits from Watching His Workers Every Move

Flights of fancy allow Southwest's profits to soar (A book review by Kenneth J. Rawley) Everyone should go Nuts." I mean what I say--but not literally. What I'm trying to communicate is that everyone should read a truly wonderful book written by Kevin and Jackie Frieberg titled: Nuts. Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. I saw an ad for the book, which had yet to be published, in an airline magazine a few months ago When I called the 800 number in the ad I was told there would be a delay in delivery; there were 7,000 people ahead of me who had already ordered the book. Before I begin talking about the book, let me say one thing that should make the "bean counters" happy: The authors contend that Southwest is the best consistent performer in the airline industry. The book includes a number of positive comments about the company: "the only U. S. airline to earn a profit every year since 1973;" profit margins "have been the highest in the industry;" in the past five years, traffic growth has ranged from 20 [percent] to 30 percent annually;" they "maintain a conservative amount of debt;" "Standard & Poor's gives Southwest a credit rating of 'A'--the highest in the U.S. airline industry;" the stock is "up 300 percent since 1990;" "according to investment guru Peter Lynch 'for return on capital Southwest has yet to be outdone;' "they have "the most productive work force in the U.S. airline industry;" and "the youngest fleet ... and the best safety record in the industry." These comments sound pretty good, if not downright admirable by anyone's standards. Here are some of the reasons for their success, but brace yourself, we're not talking about average stuff here. Southwest's chief executive officer, Herb Kelleher, has been known to show up in drag at annual meetings. He rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and "won't even discuss the possibility of furloughing people." On one occasion, to avoid going to court over a contested advertising slogan, Kelleher arm-wrestled the chairman of the other company in front of a packed auditorium (with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.) Sometimes, a Southwest plane will pull into a hanger and Kelleher will be on the tarmac with an open bar set up so he can party with the crew. Pilots say whatever they want over the intercom, and flight attendants sometimes hide in overhead luggage bins, popping out" to surprise customers as they board. Impromptu parties can erupt at any time. One that occurred at headquarters on the Fourth of July involved "the entire finance department, dressed in patriotic costumes ... marching through the halls and riding makeshift floats pulled by bicycles." These shenanigans are evidence of the extent to which Southwest believes that "celebration inspires motivation and re-energizes people." Who are these people that work at Southwest? One chapter of the book is titled "Professionals Need Not Apply," with a subtitle "Hire for attitude, train for skills." Says Kelleher: "Anybody who likes to be called a 'professional probably shouldn't be around Southwest Airlines. We want people who can do things with humor and grace." Southwest looks for people ("first and foremost") with a good sense of humor. (One job applicant, a prospective pilot, was rude to two Southwest employees on his way to his interview. Although he was exceptionally qualified technically, "he was automatically disqualified" due to his attitude. This focus on humor has helped make the place fun, and one result is that some job seekers have tried to display their sense of humor upfront. Prospective employees "have sent in applications filled out in crayon, delivered in cereal boxes, mounted on top of pizzas, packaged with confetti and noisemakers, and even done up as labels on bottles of Wild Turkey (Kelleher's favorite liquor.)" In 1995, 124,000 applications were received for 5,473 jobs. The outfit has developed a culture wherein employees have a sense of working somewhere special, resulting in a pride of ownership" such that when you talk to a ramper or a flight attendant, they'll tell you what the stock price is that day." In a section titled The Party Never Ends," the book explains that all over the Southwest system you will hear people say, 'we work hard and we play hard." The authors suggest that except in companies like Southwest, you don't see much festivity and celebration in the corridors of corporate America. Under the cloak of professionalism,' we've become too serious. Seduced by the mentality that says business, in order to be effective, must always be serious, we have grown heavy hearted. To deny our need to celebrate is to deny a part of what it means to be human." Amen. Perhaps the most controversial chapter in the book is titled "Customers Come Second. And Still Get Great Service." Kelleher makes it clear that his employees come first; even if it means dismissing customers. But aren't customers always right? "No, they are not," Kelleher says. And I think that's one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don't carry those sorts of customers. We write them and say, "Fly someone else. Don't abuse our people." The authors support this unusual contention, suggesting that when employees feel they are being treated humanely, when they receive 'legendary service', they provide the kind of customer service for which Southwest Airline is so well known." The airline is a wild place to work. But none other than management maven Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) considers the place "an absolutely amazing company ... one that dares to unleash the imagination and energy of its people ... they make work fun--employees have the freedom to act like nuts ... [they've] made flying an event" while offering "service that is absolutely outrageous." Peters finds several reasons for their success, including: "being crazy enough to follow an unorthodox vision, being courageous enough to allow people to have fun and be 'real' people who love and care at work, and being smart enough to recognize that their most valuable assets are their people and the culture they create." If you're looking for a neat book on how one company has developed a culture that has brought great rewards; for customers, employees, management and stockholders, get crazy and buy this book. Rawley is director of sales and marketing for Cohoes Savings Bank. Mr. Eden Profits from Watching His Workers' Every Move by Tony Horwitz, The Wall Street Journal (December 1994) Control is one of Ron Eden's favorite words. "This is a controlled environment." he says of the blank brick building that houses his company, Electronic Banking System Inc. Inside, long lines of women sit at spartan desks, slitting envelopes, sorting contents and filling out "Control cards that record how many letters they have opened and how long it has taken them. Workers here, in "the cage," must process three envelopes a minute. Nearby, other women tap keyboards, keeping pace with a quota that demands 8,500 strokes an hour. The room is silent. Talking is forbidden. The windows are covered. Coffee mugs, religious pictures and other adornments are barred from workers' desks. In his office upstairs, Mr. Eden sits before a TV monitor that flashes images from eight cameras posted through the plant. "There's a little bit of Sneaky Pete to it," he says, using a remote control to zoom in on a document atop a worker's desk. "1 can basically read that and figure out how someone's day is going." This day, like most others, is going smoothly, and Mr. Eden's business has boomed as a result. "We maintain a lot of control," he says. "Order and control are everything in this business." Mr. Eden's business belongs to a small but expanding financial service known as lockbox processing." Many companies and charities that once did their paperwork in-house now "outsource" clerical tasks to firms like EBS, which processes donations to groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Doris Day Animal League, Greenpeace and the National Organization for Women. More broadly, EBS reflects the explosive growth of jobs in which workers perform low-wage and limited tasks in white-collar settings. This has transformed towns like Hagerstown; a blue-collar community hit hard by industrial layoffs in the 1970s, into sites for thousands of jobs in factory-sized offices. Many of these jobs, though, are part-time and most pay far less than the manufacturing occupations they replaced. Some workers at EBS start at the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour and most earn about $6 an hour. The growth of such jobs; which often cluster outside major cities; also completes a curious historic circle. During the Industrial Revolution, farmers' daughters went to work in textile towns like Lowell, Mass. In post-industrial America, many women of modest means and skills are entering clerical mills where they process paper instead of cloth (coincidentally, EBS occupies a former garment factory). "The office of the future can look a lot like the factory of the past", says Barbara Garson, author of The Electronic Sweatshop and other books on the modern workplace. "Modern tools are being used to bring 19th-century working conditions into the white collar world." The time-motion philosophies of Frederick Taylor, for instance, have found a 1990s correlate in the phone, computer and camera, which can be used to monitor workers more closely than a foreman with a stopwatch ever could. Also, the nature of the work often justifies a vigilant eye. In EBS workers handle thousands of dollars in checks and cash, and Mr. Eden says cameras help deter would be thieves. Tight security also reassures visiting clients. "If you're disorderly, they'll think we're out of control and that things could get lost," says Mr. Eden, who worked as a financial controller for the National Rifle Association before founding EBS in 1983. But tight observation also helps EBS monitor productivity and weed out workers who don't keep up. "There's multiple uses," Mr. Eden says of surveillance. His desk is covered with computer printouts recording the precise toll of keystrokes tapped by each data-entry worker. He also keeps a day-to-day tally of errors. The work floor itself resembles an enormous classroom in the throes of exam period. Desks point toward the front, where a manager keeps watch from a raised platform that workers call "the pedestal" or "the birdhouse." Other supervisors are positioned toward the back of the room. "If you want to watch someone," Mr. Eden explains, "it's easier from behind because they don't know you're watching." There also is a black globe hanging from the ceiling, in which cameras are positioned. Mr. Eden sees nothing Orwellian about this omniscience. "It's not a Big Brother attitude," he says. "It's more of a calming attitude." But studies of workplace monitoring suggest otherwise. Experts say that surveillance can create a hostile environment in which workers feel pressured, paranoid and prone to stress-related illness. Surveillance also can be used punitively, to intimidate workers or to justify their firing. Following a failed union drive at EBS, the National Labor Relations Board filed a series of complaints against the company, including charges that EBS threatened, interrogated and spied on workers. As part of an out-of-court settlement, EBS reinstated a fired worker and posted a notice that it would refrain from illegal practices during a second union vote, which also failed. "It's all noise," Mr. Eden says of the unfair labor charges. As to the pressure that surveillance creates, Mr. Eden sees that simply as "the nature of the beast." He adds: "It's got to add stress when everyone knows their production is being monitored. I don't apologize for that." Mr. Eden also is unapologetic about the Draconian work rules he maintains, including one that forbids all talk unrelated to the completion of each task. "I'm not paying people to chat. I'm paying them to open envelopes," he says. Of the blocked windows. Mr. Eden adds: "I don't want them looking out, it's distracting. They'll make mistakes." This total focus boosts productivity but it makes many workers feel lonely and trapped. Some try to circumvent the silence rule, like kids in a school library. "If you don't turn your head and sort of mumble out of the side of your mouth, supervisors won't hear you most of the time," Cindy Kesselring explains during her lunch break. Even so, she feels isolated and often longs for her former job as a waitress. "Work is your social life, particularly if you've got kids," says the 27-year-old mother. "Here it's hard to get to know people because you can't talk." During lunch, workers crowd in the parking lot outside, chatting nonstop. "Some of us don't eat much because the more you chew the less you can talk," Ms. Kesselring says. There aren't other breaks and workers aren't allowed to sip coffee or eat at their desks during the long stretches before and after lunch. Hard candy is the only permitted desk snack. New technology, and the breaking down of labor into discrete, repetitive tasks, also have effectively stripped jobs such as those at EBS of whatever variety and skills clerical work once possessed. Workers in the cage (an antiquated banking term for a money-handling area) only open envelopes and sort contents: those in the audit department compute figures: and data-entry clerks punch in the information that the others have collected. If they make a mistake, the computer buzzes and a message such as "check digit error" flashes on the screen. "We don't ask these people to think; the machines think for them," Mr. Eden says. "They don't have to make any decisions." This makes the work simpler but also deepens its monotony. In the cage, Carol Smith says she looks forward to envelopes that contain anything out of the ordinary, such as letters reporting that the donor is deceased. Or she plays mental games. "I think to myself, A goes in this pile, B goes here and C goes there; sort of like Bingo." She says she sometimes feels like a machine," particularly when she fills out the control card" on which she lists "time in and time out for each tray of envelopes. In a slot marked "cage operator" Ms. Smith writes her code number, 3173. "That's me." she says. Barbara Ann Wiles, a key board operator, also plays mind games to break up the boredom. Tapping in the names and addresses of new donors, she tries to imagine the faces behind the names, particularly the odd ones. "Like this one, Mrs. Fittizzi," she chuckles. "I can picture her as a very stout lady with a strong accent, hollering on a street corner." She picks out another: "Doris Angelroth, she's very sophisticated, a monocle maybe, drinking tea on an overstuffed mohair couch." It is a world remote from the one Ms. Wiles inhabits. Like most EBS employees, she must juggle her low-paying job with child care. On this Friday, for instance, Ms. Wiles will finish her eight-hour shift at about 4 P.M., go home for a few hours, then return for a second shift from midnight to 8 A.M. Otherwise, she would have to come in on Saturday to finish the week's work. "This way i can be home on the weekend to look after my kids," she says. Others find the work harder to leave behind at the end of the day. In the cage, Ms. Smith says her husband used to complain because she often woke him in the middle of the night. "I'd be shuffling my hands in my sleep," she says, mimicking the motion of opening envelopes. Her cage colleague, Ms. Kesselring, says her fianc has a different gripe. He dodges me for a couple of hours after work because I don't shut up; I need to talk, talk, talk," she says. And there is one household task she can no longer abide. "I won't pay bills because I can't stand to open another envelope," she says. I'll leave letters sitting in the mailbox for days." Source: Tony Horwitz. Mr. Edens Profits from Watching His Workers Every Move." The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1994