Alaska Airlines Case Study: Kotter's Step 1 & 2

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(a) What happened in the case was that the executives of Alaska met in a strategic planning session in Blaine, Washington. Initially, during this session, only a few of the top executives met to discuss the fact that "the airline was draining" customer loyalty and goodwill. The point they discussed was the extent to which the customers would tolerate the indifferent performance of Alaska. Kotter's creating urgency was introduced to the entire executive group an exercise in which they asked the executives what they would do if the Carlyle Group acquired Alaska Airlines (1). The executives would be given 12 months to fix the operations sustainably without severance. The executives were divided into groups where they discussed aspects of the problem and generated suggestions for improvement. The recommendations that emerged were that Seattle operations should be fixed first, a higher level person was required to devote 100 of time to fixing the Seattle hub, and the person should have authority across functions and departments. Next, the executive leadership appointed the staff vice-president of operations as the VP of Seattle Operation. The VP of Seattle Operations was told that they must fix operations at the Seattle Airport and that each functional operational unit not only reported to her functional manager but also to the new VP of Seattle Operations. Kotter's team formation took place when the new VP brought all the leaders of Seattle targeting and started a data-driven process which involved identifying standard processes, a detailed timeline for a time between aircraft arrival and departure, and issuing scorecards to show the performance of Alaska in the designated processes. After that process improvement measures were applied to ...