Alan Mulally

Alan Roger Mulally (born August 4, 1945) is an American aerospace engineer and manufacturing executive. He was the CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes from 1998 to 2006, and later as president and chief executive officer of the Ford Motor Company from 2006 to 2014.

He began his career with Boeing as an engineer in 1969 and was largely credited with Boeing's resurgence against Airbus in the mid-2000s. Mulally is also widely credited with turning around Ford during the Great Recession, when American competitors were declared bankrupt and were bailed out by the federal government. Mulally's achievements at Ford are chronicled in the book American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman, published in 2012. On July 15, 2014, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of Google, a position which he had left by 2024.

In 2015, Mulally was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

Mulally was born in Oakland, California, the son of Lauraine Lizette (Clark) and Charles R. Mulally, who met at a USO dance. Mulally grew up in his mother's hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, where he was a member of Plymouth Congregational Church. He considered Rev. Dale Turner "a mentor and an inspiration". He used to sit at the front of the church to study the minister's influence on the congregation. Mulally said that he found himself motivated at the age of 17 by president John F. Kennedy's challenge to send a man to the moon.

Mulally graduated from the University of Kansas, also his mother's alma mater, with Bachelor of Science (1968) and Master of Science (1969) degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. He was also a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity. He received a Master's degree in Management (S.M.) as a Sloan Fellow from MIT's Sloan School of Management in 1982.

Mulally was hired by Boeing immediately out of college in 1969 as an engineer. He held a number of engineering and program management positions, making contributions to the Boeing 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, and Boeing 777 projects. He led the cockpit design team on the 757/767 project. Its revolutionary design featured the first all-digital flight deck in a commercial aircraft, the second two-man crew for long range aircraft after the Airbus A300, and a common type rating for pilots on two different aircraft. He worked on the 777 program first as director of engineering and, from September 1992, as vice president and general manager.

He was later named as vice president of Engineering for the commercial airplane group. He is known and recognized for elevating Phil Condit's "Working Together" philosophy through and beyond the 777 program. In 1994, Mulally was promoted to senior vice president of Airplane Development and was in charge of all airplane development activities, flight test operations, certification, and government technical liaison. In 1997, Mulally became the president of the Boeing Information, Space & Defense Systems and senior vice president. He held this position until 1998 when he was made president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes; chief executive officer duties were added in 2001.

Following the forced resignations of CEOs Phil Condit in 2003 and Harry Stonecipher in 2005 of parent The Boeing Company, Mulally was considered one of the leading internal candidates for the position. When Mulally was passed over in both instances, questions were raised about whether he would remain with the company.

For Mulally's performance at Boeing, Aviation Week & Space Technology named him as person of the year for 2006.

Former Ford CEO Donald Petersen recommended Mulally to Ford, and he was named the president and CEO of Ford Motor Company on September 5, 2006, succeeding Bill Ford, who became executive chairman. Mulally called his Lexus LS430 the 'finest car in the world', just as Ford was about to announce his selection as CEO, making the point that Mulally was not then in a leadership position, though he then faced some criticism and switched to driving Ford models. William Clay Ford Jr. had been searching for his successor as Ford CEO for some time, with Daimler AG's Dieter Zetsche and Renault/Nissan Motors's Carlos Ghosn both turning down the offer.

Mulally negotiated four new agreements with the United Auto Workers, which brought down labor costs from $76/hour to $55/hour.

He lived within three miles of his office at Ford's global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. He had a meeting with Ford's executives, called a "Business Plan Review" (BPR) every Thursday at 7 a.m. in the "Thunderbird Room" at Ford's headquarters. At a "town meeting" of 100 information technology staffers in February 2007, Mulally said, "We have been going out of business for 40 years", and repeated his message to other employee groups.

McKinsey & Company asked Mulally how he maintained his mental and physical stamina, to which he responded: "Everybody always talks about how you need to manage your time. You need to manage your energy as well. You first have to ask, 'What gives me energy?' There can be lots of sources: your family, exercise, your spiritual well-being... In our house, we had a family meeting every week—the family BPR ["Business Plan Review"]—where we reviewed what we needed to do and the support required to get us through the week. It is another kind of process step, and a really important one."