When South West Airlines fired “un-calibrated cannonballs”

Adopted from Jim Collins’s book titled “Great By Choice”

“Fire Bullets” Then “Cannonballs” approach mentioned in his book needs firing cannonballs when the bullets hit the incremental innovation targets.

10X companies for e.g. SWA ideally fire calibrated cannonballs out of empirical validation and hence have achieved unparalleled  success.

But history is witness to the fact that even SWA have fired “un-calibrated cannonballs” for e.g. acquisition of Muse Air in 1980’s.The only difference is that these companies have the needed discipline to learn from their mistakes and hence have been able to turn around from failures.