Good times are for getting the house in order so things don’t go sideways in the future and creating frameworks for when things inevitably do go sideways. If you have good plans and everyone is one the same page people can fall back to standard operating procedure and not over think things or panic because they don’t know what to do.<p>In the case of Southwest they failed to invest in critical infrastructure and probably contingency planning as well. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am sure there were/are people who knew this was a ticking time bomb.
Notably, Kelleher stepped down from the CEO role at Southwest in 2001. So this crazy debacle of 2022 is largely a result of management that has not followed Kelleher's guidance.
Yet, what we do in good times is cut margins until they are so thin that the good times get better, and then everything explodes during bad times so everyone asks for bailouts<p>Eg, unsustainable agriculture, manufacturing, banking…