Glenn Rifkin

His death, at Massachusetts General Hospital, was caused by a sudden acute illness following aorta surgery, his wife, Margaret Flowers, said.

The original source of Flowers’ renown was an undergraduate course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the unprepossessing name 2.70 Introduction to Design, which he started teaching in the 1970s.

He would begin the course by handing students what he called “creativity kits” — a grab bag of random parts like paper clips, screws, bolts and wire. He would then have them form teams and instruct them to spend the semester, with him as their guide, designing robotic devices that, if successful, would be able to complete a task of Flowers’ choosing, like placing square pegs in a round hole.

At semester’s end, the teams would compete before an audience to determine whose device solved the problem most effectively. The event became immensely popular, attracting huge crowds and ultimately the attention of PBS, which broadcast it for several years on the series “Discover: The World of Science.”

Flowers later parlayed that exposure into a popular PBS series of his own, “Scientific American Frontiers,” which he hosted from 1990 to 1993.

“The most sophisticated thing designers ever do is decide what to design,” Flowers told MIT Technology Review in a 2011 article titled “A Champion for Supernerds.” “Telling students in an introductory class to design ‘something’ thus challenged them with the most complex task they could face.”

His philosophy on design thinking and his learn-by-doing methods influenced not only generations of MIT students but also academic engineering programs around the world. Most mechanical engineering departments now offer project-oriented, hands-on courses as part of their curriculums.

The Flowers methods “became the standard way design is taught across all engineering schools,” said Megan Smith, a former student who found success as a tech entrepreneur and served under President Barack Obama as the chief technology officer of the United States.

Flowers’ course was so popular that many non-engineering students took it as well.

“It broadens participation so you have more gender balance,” Smith said in a phone interview. “More people are interested if they do something and understand what it’s for while they are doing it.”

Flowers’ influence extended beyond college campuses. In the early 1990s, iconoclastic inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen recruited him to adapt the 2.70 contest concept for teams of high school students in Kamen’s FIRST Robotics Competition. The nonprofit organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was Kamen’s brainchild, aimed at inspiring students to embrace STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and make it as popular an extracurricular activity as football or basketball.

The FIRST competition began in 1992 with 28 teams in a Manchester, New Hampshire, high school gym. It has since morphed into a global phenomenon, with thousands of teams from more than 100 countries competing in giant arenas for tens of millions of dollars in college scholarships. More than 2 million students, from kindergarten through 12th grade, have participated.

“You couldn’t find a more esteemed professor, especially when it comes to robotics and competitions, than Woodie Flowers,” Kamen said in a phone interview. “He stayed with us the whole way, and he was everybody’s professor. He fully understood what we were trying to do, and he was just a fantastic believer.”

With his gray mustache, his ponytail and his warm Southern accent (he was born in Louisiana), Flowers cut a distinctive figure at the annual FIRST championship, serving as its genial master of ceremonies.

As much philosopher and humanist as engineer, he instilled what he termed a “gracious professionalism” into his competitions at MIT and nurtured the same ethos at FIRST. The competitions teach young people “to compete like crazy but treat one another with respect and kindness in the process,” he told The Tech, MIT’s campus newspaper, in a 2011 interview.

“And for the most part, students in 2.70 took pride in teaching others what they’d learned,” he added, “sharing the results of their experiments, sharing ideas. No one thumbed their nose at someone they just beat. It was much more common for a 22-year-old male to give another a hug after his machine just trounced the other.”

Woodie Claude Flowers (he was named after two grandfathers) was born Nov. 18, 1943, in Jena, Louisiana. His mother, Bertie Graham Flowers, was an elementary-school teacher who later taught special education. His father, Aber Lafayette Flowers, known as Abe, was a welder and an inventor.

His father instilled in Woodie a passion for tinkering by letting him help on countless projects, including building a hot-rod car from parts of another vehicle. “I learned as much engineering from my father as I did in engineering school,” he said. His mother taught him a love for nature and reading.

With few financial options, he did not originally see college as part of his plans. “I was going to get a job in an oil field and buy a Corvette,” he told Technology Review.

But an attentive high school teacher suggested that he might be able to go to college on a scholarship for physically disabled students: A childhood fall from a tree had left him with a misshapen elbow and an arm that he was never able to straighten. Following that advice, he applied for and received a scholarship to Louisiana Tech University.

There he met Margaret Weas, a fellow engineering student, whom he married in 1967. She became a lifelong collaborator and colleague in all his academic endeavors. The couple had no children, but, she said in an interview, “the MIT kids and the FIRST kids were his children.”

He went on to MIT for both his master’s and his Ph.D. and joined its faculty in 1972.

Flowers’ insatiable curiosity took him along an eclectic mix of paths — and not just on wheels, as he liked to use now and then to get around at MIT. He became an avid nature photographer, attended trapeze school, took polo lessons and learned to scuba dive, sky-dive and drive racecars, almost all with his wife as a participating partner.

They traveled the world, from Antarctica to the Galápagos Islands, and before his death had just returned from “chasing panthers in the Pantanal in Brazil,” Margaret Flowers said.

She worked as a systems engineer and program manager for a large computer company for 25 years before retiring early to support her husband’s work with FIRST.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Kay Wells.

Years ago, Flowers began what he called the “4 a.m. book club” at the home where he and his wife lived in Weston, Massachusetts. They would wake before dawn, drink coffee and discuss books about politics, philosophy and quantum mechanics.

Asked by Technology Review what hobbies he had, he declined to specify, “because I like everything.” He added, “And that’s fun — not necessarily letting one kind of thing define me.”

This article originally appeared in

Woodie Flowers, Who Made Science a Competitive Sport, Dies at 75

Woodie Flowers, an innovative and flamboyant mechanical engineering professor at MIT (he liked to roller-blade and ride unicycles through its august halls) who championed a hands-on learning philosophy that reshaped engineering and design education and turned him into something of a celebrity, died Oct. 11 in Boston. He was 75.

<h1>Herb Kelleher, who turned conventional airline industry wisdom on its head by combining low fares with high standards of customer service to build Southwest Airlines into one of the nation’s most successful and admired companies, died Thursday. He was 87.</h1>

The airline announced his death on Twitter. It did not say where he died or give a cause. Southwest is based in Dallas, and Kelleher had a home there.

Under the fun-loving, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, New Jersey-born Kelleher, Southwest, which began in 1971 as a low-fare intrastate carrier serving three Texas cities — Houston, Dallas and San Antonio — grew into the behemoth that today carries more than 120 million passengers a year, making it the nation’s most popular domestic airline.

Southwest employs more than 58,000 people and has been profitable every year since two years after it was founded. During Kelleher’s tenure, the company never had a layoff, furlough or pay cut, despite being among the most unionized airlines in the world.

His vision for the airline — one that reshaped the industry — centered on using more fuel-efficient, low-cost planes to reduce fares and challenging his employees to provide no-frills service without lowering standards.

Robert Mann, an airline industry analyst and former executive, said that by eliminating onerous fees and unnecessary services and using secondary airports, like Love Field in Dallas, Southwest brought low prices to the market and stimulated demand for air travel. Now, given a choice between driving and flying, legions of travelers opted for the plane.

At a time when Braniff’s coach fare between Dallas and San Antonio was $62, for example, Southwest’s fare for the same route was $15. Kelleher stuck to the low-fare concept, believing that lower prices did not mean lower profits.

“He literally brought air travel to the masses on a scale that was unimaginable,” Mann said. Southwest’s entry into a market inevitably led to lower fares across the board. This became known as the Southwest Effect.

By paying his employees well, avoiding layoffs and instilling a spirit of fun in the company’s culture, Kelleher also set a tone for Southwest that translated into customer loyalty.

“You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune magazine in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”

What sounded like a business cliché translated into tremendous cost savings for Southwest. Its employee productivity levels were far higher than those of the competition, and even as salaries rose, the company managed to keep fares low and profits high. The company was a perennial choice for Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” list.

When Kelleher stepped down as chairman at the annual shareholder meeting in 2008, he received “the kind of standing ovation usually reserved for rock stars,” The New York Times reported. Even the Southwest pilots union, in the midst of negotiating a new contract, took out a full-page advertisement in USA Today thanking him for all he had done.

Kelleher’s quick-witted, down-home observations were legend in the industry. “Because I am unable to perform competently any meaningful function at Southwest, our employees let me be CEO,” he once told the National Civil Aviation Review Commission. “That is one among many reasons why I love the people of Southwest Airlines.”

A hard drinker with an ever-present Kool cigarette in his mouth, he liked to dress like Elvis Presley or other characters at company meetings and maintain a level of fun in the workplace.

In 1992, when both Southwest and Stevens Aviation were using the advertising tagline “Just Plane Smart,” the companies got locked into a debate over which had the rights to the idea. Kelleher suggested that in place of litigation, he and Kurt Herwald, the Stevens chief executive, arm-wrestle for it. And though Kelleher lost the match, the publicity was so positive that Herwald relented and let Southwest keep the tagline.

Herbert Dwight Kelleher was born March 12, 1931, in Camden, New Jersey, to Harry and Ruth (Moore) Kelleher. His father was a general manager at a Campbell’s Soup factory. Herb was captain of his high school basketball team.

He credited his mother as his primary influence. She would engage him in long conversations about life when he was a child. “She was very ethical,” he was quoted as saying in “The Art of Business: In the Footsteps of Giants,” a 2004 book about leadership by Raymond T. Yeh.

“She had a very democratic view of life,” he continued. “She had enormously wide interests in politics and business, so it was very educational in that respect, just talking with her. We’d sit up and talk to two, three, and four o’clock in the morning when I was quite young, about how you should behave, the goals that you should have, the ethics you should follow, how business worked, how politics can join with business.”

After attending Wesleyan University in Connecticut and later New York University Law School, Kelleher began his career as a lawyer. He married Joan Negley in 1955, and the couple had four children while living in New Jersey. But a desire to start his own firm prompted him to move the family to San Antonio.

His wife, three of their children and many grandchildren survive, Southwest said.

In 1967, one of Kelleher’s clients, Rollin King, approached him with what seemed an outlandish idea: starting an airline that could fly passengers cheaply within Texas. King, who died in 2014, believed that Kelleher was just crazy enough to sign on. By their telling, they sketched out their ideas on a cocktail napkin.

They soon ran into a wave of hostility from the industry. Competitors like Texas International, Braniff and Continental waged four years of litigation before Southwest Airlines could make its first flight. When the airline began service in 1971, it had four Boeing 737s in its fleet.

Southwest was able to reduce fares by flying only within Texas, avoiding prices that would have otherwise been mandated by the Civil Aeronautics Board.

Nonetheless, the airline struggled its first two years. When it ran into financial troubles in 1973, it chose to sell off one of its planes rather than lay off employees. At the same time, it instituted an ambitious 15-minute turnaround at the gate, with flight crews pitching in to help clean and service the planes to get them off the ground more quickly. Planes were profitable only when they were flying, Kelleher reasoned.

He infused the airline’s nascent culture with a clear set of values, like opting for efficiency over costly frills, which he felt was the only way to increase profits. “If somebody makes a proposal, and it infringes on those values, you don’t study it for two years,” he said. “You just say `No, we don’t do that.’ And you go on quickly.”

As the airline’s co-founder and legal counsel, Kelleher fought its many courtroom battles. He became chief executive temporarily in 1978 and permanently in 1981.

He introduced countless efficiencies, beginning with fuel-saving short-haul flights. Southwest refused to pay millions of dollars to be part of larger airlines’ reservation systems, and its focus on customer service kept the brand polished.

In 1978, with the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act, Southwest added service to New Orleans; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Oklahoma City; and 14 other cities. In early 1982, it added San Diego; Kansas City, Missouri; Las Vegas; and Phoenix. It was well on its way to becoming a major national carrier.

To stay close to customers, Kelleher would often board flights just to chat with passengers. In a 1997 article for the Peter F. Drucker Foundation, he wrote: “We market ourselves on the personality and spirit of ourselves. That sounds like an easy claim but, in fact, it is a supremely dangerous position to stake out because if you’re wrong, customers will let you know — with a vengeance. Customers are like a force of nature: You can’t fool them, and you ignore them at your peril.”

Kelleher, whose net worth was estimated at $2.5 billion, exhibited business savvy on other fronts. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he engaged in extensive fuel hedging, locking in contracts to buy fuel at a certain price regardless of whether prices rose or fell. The strategy saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs. While every major United States airlines declared bankruptcy at one time or another, Southwest remained profitable and growth-oriented.

All the while, Kelleher “didn’t take himself too seriously,” Mann, the industry analyst, said.

“What was great about Southwest under Herb,” he said, “was it created expectations that were modest at best, but they routinely exceeded those expectations. The bigger airlines created expectations they could never meet.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f2c43d98-9f23-4770-880b-2a623c8c2438" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/obituaries/herb-kelleher-whose-southwest-airlines-reshaped-the-industry-dies-at-87.html">The New York Times</a>.

Herb Kelleher, who let Southwest Airlines fly with vision, dies at 87

The airline announced his death on Twitter. It did not say where he died or give a cause. Southwest is based in Dallas, and Kelleher had a home there.

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Glenn Rifkin

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Woodie Flowers, Who Made Science a Competitive Sport, Dies at 75

Herb Kelleher, who let Southwest Airlines fly with vision, dies at 87