Under Bethunes leadership, the Go Forward Plan, along with a reenergized workforce, has helped Continental make rapid

strides.
Within two years, it moved from worst to first in many airline
performance metrics, including on-time performance, lost baggage
claims, and customer satisfaction.
After this success, Gordon Bethune and his management team
raised the bar with a new vision.
Instead of merely performing best, they wanted Continental to be
their customers favorite
airline. The First to Favorite strategy built on Continentals
operational success and focused on treating customers extremely
well, especially the high-value customers.
The higher I got, the clearer one lesson became. Regardless of the
specific processes involved, no matter how many people I was in
charge of, they were all still people; and focusing on their needs, as
people, was going to make things work.

Performance management is the systematic process of:

planning work and setting expectations
continually monitoring performance
developing the capacity to perform
periodically rating performance in a summary fashion
rewarding good performance.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENTS FIVE KEY COMPONENTS:

PLANNING
Set goals and measures
Establish and communicate REWARDING elements and standards
Recognize and reward good performance
RATING

Summarize performance
Assign the rating of record DEVELOPING
Address poor performance
Improve good performance
MONITORING
Measure performance
Provide feedback
Conduct progress review

> Customer Relationship Marketing provides customer service nely tuned

by segmentation.
At any time, Continental can see a single, real-time prole of any of its
customers and act accordingly.
>

Empowered Employees
Employees are empowered with access to the information they need, when
they need it, to get answers and implement.
Employees are one of the key resources at Continental, and more productive
employees mean better margins. Kellner believes that employees rarely
make mistakes on purpose. Before the EDW, without relevant data, the
thousands of decisions that Continental made about its 2,300 ights a day

were based on guesses and assumptions. In an environment without reliable

information, it is difficult for any employee to succeed

Business Strategy:
> Fly to Win.
Understand what products customers want and what they are willing to pay
for.
> Fund the Future.
Manage costs and cash ow so the airline can continue to operate.
> Make Reliability a Reality.
Get customers to their destination safely,
on time and with their luggage.
> Work Together.
Create a culture where people want to come to work.

SWOT

analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

analysis) is a framework for identifying and analyzing the internal and
external factors that can have an impact on the viability of a project,
product, place or person.
As its name states, a SWOT analysis examines four elements:

Strengths - internal attributes and resources that support a successful

outcome.
Weaknesses - internal attributes resources that work against a

successful outcome.
Opportunities - external factors the project can capitalize on or use to

its advantage.

Threats - external factors that could jeopardize the project.

Once the SWOT factors are identied, decision makers should be able to
better ascertain if the project or goal is worth pursuing and what is required
to make it successful