(CBS)Something unusual is going on at Southwest Airlines. Everyone is happy. They all kiss and hug, even President Colleen Barrett and CEO Gary Kelly.

Average Southwest employees like the big bosses. They want to get their picture taken with Kelly. They admire him.

“I think some CEOs have to travel with bodyguards,” he told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. “So you think about that contrast, it’s just something you can’t take for granted.”

Kelly says the difference between his company and others is simple: “People working together, people lovin’ each other, people respecting each other.”

Southwest Airlines has been profitable every year since 1973. No other U.S. airline can say that. It’s never had a layoff. It’s never cut salaries. In fact, it’s one of the best-paid, most highly-unionized airlines in the industry. What makes it so successful? A smart business plan, of course, but there is something else that Southwest deems crucial:

“You put your employees first and if you take care of them, then they will take good care of you,” Herb Kelleher, the airline’s chairman, said. “Then your customers will come back, and your shareholders will like that, so it’s really a unity.”

Kelleher is legendary in the airline industry for doing things differently than the competition. Before he found himself Southwest’s pitchman, Kelleher was a lawyer retained by the airline to get it off the ground i a fight that took him all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It seemed the last thing Southwest’s competitors wanted to see was a low-cost upstart doing nothing but flying around Texas in and out of Dallas Love Field.

In 1971, “the love airline” took off. At first, Southwest was known for sexy flight attendants in hot pants, which got it the attention it needed.

“You can have a low-cost carrier and people still don’t fly it because they don’t know about it,” Kelleher said. “And so, the schtick kind of fit in with getting known.”

By 1978, Kelleher was running the place. His way of doing that was to bring his affectionate, sometimes outrageous sense of fun to management.

“I enjoy, not the theatricality of it, but the opportunity it gives me to be with our people,” he said.

“Malice in Dallas” in 1992 had to have been his goofiest stunt: Instead of going to court over who had the rights to the advertising slogan “Just plane smart” i Southwest or a South Carolina aviation sales company i Kelleher agreed to settle the matter with a charity arm wrestling match.

“We’re saying, we’re having fun,” he said. “We want you to have fun, too.”

So on any given day, during the final approach into Dallas from Houston, you might hear flight attendant, Cassie Plourd, singing you down. Plourd has been with Southwest 18 years, and so has Frannie Oberman, who says the best joke she tells to passengers is that she’s addicted to pressurization.

Today, Southwest Airlines has nearly 34,000 employees. It flies to 64 different cities, has more than 500 planes and is the nation’s sixth largest airline. But what makes Southwest Southwest is the fact that it turns flights around fast. This came about by accident because in the beginning, when it had only four airplanes, it had to sell one of them just to stay in business.

“And they went out to the ground ops folks and said, ‘Guess what? We’re gonna maintain the same schedule that we had with four aircraft now with three aircraft,’” said Kevin Freiberg, who co-wrote a book on Southwest with his wife, Jackie. “And of course, everybody said, ‘How are you gonna do that?’ He said, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to turn an airplane in 10 minutes’ and of course the average turn-around time at that point was more like 45 minutes or an hour.”

Here is where the relationship the airline has with its employees comes in. It is what is known as the Southwest culture.

“In the majority of businesses that are truly successful today, they’ve got a really definitive cause that everybody rallies around and believes in and serves toward, and works hard for. I think that’s critical and Southwest got that 34 years ago,” Jackie Freiberg said.

Turnarounds now average 23 minutes, but that’s still better than half the time it takes other airlines. Customers, as passengers are called, are herded onto planes in three big groups. They don’t have assigned seats, but most of the time, they don’t seem to mind.

And when he asked his pilots’ union to agree to a five-year pay freeze, Kelleher took one, too. He figures it cost him $75 million to $100 million in compensation, but it bought him trust.

“To me, seventy, hundred million i what difference does it make?” Kelleher said. “There’s nothing particular I’d like to do that I can’t do.”

If you walk down any hall in Southwest’s Dallas headquarters, there are thousands of pictures i glimpses of what love looks like at the love airline after all these years.

Southwest’s culture bears the likeness of Kelleher and Colleen Barrett, who are in the process of retiring. Employees and analysts alike agree that the future of the airline depends on preserving it when Kelleher and Barrett are gone.

“When I first came here I thought, where’s the Kool Aid?” Oberman said. “And it was sort of, ‘This can’t be true.’”

There are some important expectations for every Southwest employee.

“They have to practice the golden rule every day i first with each other, and then with our passengers,” Barrett said. “They have to serve because they want to. They have to smile because they want to, not because they have to.”

(08-14) 07:48 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) —

Wall Street pulled back on Monday as investors showed concern about the pace of consumer spending after Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reported weaker-than-expected quarterly results.

The world’s biggest retailer cut its profit outlook amid weak economic conditions that are crimping consumer spending. Home Depot Inc., the world’s largest home improvement chain, said Tuesday that weakness in the housing market caused its quarterly profit to slip almost 15 percent.

The pair of disappointing earnings reports offset government data released before the market opened that indicated that inflation remains in check. The Labor Department said wholesale prices rose in July for the fifth time in six months, while the Commerce Department said the U.S. trade deficit fell to a four-month low in June.

Despite the decline in major indexes, analysts said the tone of the market appears more stable compared to the recent volatility triggered by a widening credit and debt crisis. The Federal Reserve, which has injected some $64 billion of liquidity into the U.S. banking system since Thursday, said Tuesday it stood ready to act again should market conditions warrant.

“Wal-Mart aside, you’re still seeing a bit of stability in the market due to central banks around the globe providing liquidity to the financial markets,” said Mike Malone, a trading analyst at Cowen & Co. “Given the fact there’s very little visibility about how the economy and credit markets will play out, this kind of market is encouraging because there is still a tremendous amount of risk out there.”

The European Central Bank injected another $10.5 billion into money markets on Tuesday and said conditions were normalizing after several days of volatility. There was no action Tuesday by the Fed.

In midmorning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 93.35, or 0.72 percent, to 13,141.18.

Broader stock indicators were lower. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index shed 11.11, or 0.76 percent, at 1,441.81, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 12.88, or 0.51 percent, at 2,529.36.

Bonds rose, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note falling to 4.76 percent from 4.78 percent late Monday. The fixed-income market has risen as stock investors move into securities deemed less volatile.

The Labor Department reported its producer price index advanced 0.6 percent amid higher energy costs. Excluding often volatile food and energy costs, however, what’s known as core PPI rose a modest 0.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said the trade deficit fell because of highest-ever exports of farm goods and automobiles offset a jump in energy prices. The trade deficit dropped to $58.1 billion in June, a 1.7 percent decrease from May and the lowest imbalance since February.

Wal-Mart, one of the 30 stocks included in the Dow, fell $2.29, or 5 percent, to $43.88. The company lowered its profit forecast amid weak economic conditions that it blames for hurting consumer spending globally. Major retailers have been reporting largely lackluster sales results for months.

The retailer’s second-quarter profit rose 49 percent but results excluding one-time items fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Wal-Mart said some of its customers were straining under economic pressures such as higher oil prices.

Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement store chain, reported a 14.8 percent decline in its second-quarter earnings as sales slipped, particularly among stores open at least a year. Quarterly figures topped Wall Street’s forecasts and the company reiterated that it expects its earnings per share from continuing operations to decline for fiscal 2007. The company said, however, that a sluggish housing sector could make conditions difficult. Shares fell 15 cents to $35.09.

Mattel Inc. shares fell 81 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $22.76 after it announced the recall of 8.8 million toys. It was the second big recall of Chinese-made toys in just two weeks.

Declining issues outpaced advancers by a 3 to 2 basis on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 242.2 million.

Light, sweet crude rose 58 cents to $72.20 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices edged higher.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 1.11, or 0.14 percent, to 780.92.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average rose 0.27 percent. In afternoon trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.40 percent, Germany’s DAX index slipped 0.16 percent, and France’s CAC-40 fell 0.22 percent.

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CORAL reefs are probably the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. But just how diverse is not known, according to Ian Poiner, chief executive of tropical marine research agency, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

Estimates of the number of species that make coral reefs their home ranges between one and 9 million.

“They are relatively small areas less than 2 per cent of the ocean area but they are incredibly important, both from an environmental, social and economic perspective,” said Dr Poiner.

The knowledge gap is now being redressed in CReefs, the coral reef component of the Census of Marine Life, a global research effort involving 80 nations in a 10-year study into the diversity and distribution of marine life in oceans.

Last week resources giant BHP Billiton announced $3.4 million in financial support for the Australian leg of the CReefs program. It is BHP’s biggest ever backing of an environmental research project.

The BHP and AIMS partnership brokered by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation ensures three Australian reef sites will be included in CReefs the Great Barrier Reef’s Heron and Lizard Islands, and Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.

The project will enable marine scientists and taxonomists to collect and identify samples during a series of field trips over four years, with the census on biodiversity aimed at improving understanding of coral reefs and how best to protect them.

Great Barrier Reef Foundation chief executive Judy Stewart said that the partnership had delivered urgently needed private funding into the reef research sector.

“Understanding coral reef biodiversity is critical to securing their future,” she said. “We need to understand how reefs operate in order to protect and preserve them.”

BHP’s vice-president of sustainable development and community relations, Ian Wood, said that the sponsorship of the research effort fell under BHP’s commitment to sustainable development.

“Part of that is to ensure that our host communities benefit from their relationship with us,” Mr Wood said. “So as well as paying taxes and royalties and employing lots of people and those sort of standard business contributions to an economy, we want to ensure that our host communities directly benefit from our presence.”

BHP ships huge amounts of minerals from Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef’s doorstep and it has major oil and gas production interests offshore WA’s north-west, home to Ningaloo.

BHP has a target of spending 1 per cent of its annual pre-tax profit on community programs. More than $US100 million ($A122 million) was spent last year. Because of the group’s increasing profits, target expenditure in 2007-08 will be about $US130 million.

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