Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines and a generally amazing entrepreneur and leader, founded his company on the basis of amazing customer service. He was often quoted as saying that Southwest was not in the airline business, but rather in the customer service business. Interestingly enough, Southwest has continually lived up to this mission and it can be attributed in large part to their unique corporate hierarchy. That hierarchy states that employees come first, customers come second and shareholders come third. The effects of this are described by Herb in this interview:

…if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy?

So…what if we look at the K-12 education system through the same lens. What would the hierarchy be?

Teachers first

Students second

Parents/Government third

I think that it is counter-intuitive to think that any group but the child/student should be in the first position, however that could be just our problem. PlansForUs is utterly focused on the teacher, because it is the teacher that is on the front lines interfacing with the customer. Providing the teacher with the flexible tools to do their job best should be the focus of any administration or government. We tend to focus on the systems that prevent teachers from failing and have the effect of dis-incenting their own customer service/teaching impulse.

Southwest would not have grown had it imposed rigid systems on its employees. By empowering employees, Southwest created a company that solved problems at the edge and then redistributed that new knowledge to all others within the system. That is how we can reform education, that’s how we can help our students. It is not about centralized systems, but rather empowered employees, solving problems at the edge and redistributing those solutions to all who can benefit.

PlansForUs is not the solution, but we are part of a broader solution that recognizes the impact of empowered teachers on education.

My buddy over at Apple passed along this site because he thought there may be some synergies between what we’re doing at PlansForUs and what Jeff is doing with Hellmansoft’s Planbook. I am going to look more deeply into it, but my first thought is that writing a lesson at PlansForUs and linking to it in your planbook seems like a pretty nice way to organize your work. It would also allow you to access your stuff on the web wherever you are. Write and link the plans at school and update them at home, hmmm. Sounds decent.
Jeff is a teacher in Oregon and I think it is awesome to see his work helping other teachers. If you have any thoughts on how we might work together, leave them in the comments. I’ll work on getting in touch with Jeff sometime next week and let you know how it goes.

In other news we began our user interface improvement project with a few interviews last night. I am excited about what we are learning and can assure you that there will be some serious improvements in usability. In the meantime, thanks for soldiering through and contributing to the growth of PlansForUs.