On Studying Aliens--Part 2

(The following is excerpted from an article by Steve Miller, author of UNCOPYABLE:How To Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition)

Part 1 ended with a reference to Deming's groundbreaking idea of extrinsic benchmarking--studying aliens. You studied people and organizations and businesses who really had no relationship to your world at all. It sounds crazy--why in the world would you do that? Here's an illustration.

In the early days of Southwest Airlines, CEO Herb Kelleher realized that they didn't make money while airplanes were on the ground. They only made money when airplanes were flying, because people pay to fly. It takes most airlines 45 minutes to an hour to clean up and prep a plane for new passengers between flights. How could he cut this downtime?

He found an answer from studying NASCAR pit crews. During a race, every second spent getting gas, changing tires, or fixing a problem can cost precious time on the track. Pit crews spend hundreds of hours practicing to do the job and get the car out as fast as possible. Nowadays, Southwest has their planes loaded and ready to fly in about 20 minutes. They average 10.5 daily flights per gate, compared to the industry average of 5.0.

How do they do it? Everyone pitches in--even the pilots--when it comes to cleaning and getting people on.

Have you ever seen a NASCAR pit crew in action? It's like a well-oiled machine; everyone is in motion, doing what needs to be done, without any wasted motion. If your car is in the pit, you're losing valuable distance on the track, so every millisecond counts. Herb Kelleher realized that kind of organized effort could solve his turnaround problem--so he hired a NASCAR pit crew to come in and teach his people how to make every second count. That's one of the reasons why Southwest Airlines is one of the top-grossing airlines around.

Next time, I'll share one more example of extrinsic benchmarking, and we'll close out this portion of our journey toward being UNCOPYABLE.