Alan Mulally

Why We Chose Him: 

Marshall Goldsmith nominated Alan Mulally for us to honor him as a Social Capital CEO, a leader Marshall thinks so highly of that he asked Alan to write the forward to his book “Work Is Love Made Visible.” 

Alan’s view of work, and his leadership style as CEO of a workplace, is married to the idea of service. “I’ve always loved serving, and work is service to me. And it was always about the people,” he says, explaining, “When you’re serving, you want to know how it’s going; you want to know what they think; you want to know what you can do to improve the environment and the culture about how we all work together.” So, he creates what he calls a “culture of love by design.”

Applying his engineering training in this people-centric direction, Alan says, “We actually design it.” It’s a working management system with five elements. “It was all about including everybody — I mean all the stakeholders — and they all know the vision, they all know the strategy, they all know the plan. And we’re all working together to turn the reds to yellows to greens and continually delivering value for everybody but also profitable growth, because you can’t help all the stakeholders if you’re not growing the business.”

His philosophy underlying his servant leadership style at Ford and earlier at Boeing he credits to his parents’ iteration and reiteration of words of guidance. “We didn’t have very many resources,” he relates. But wisdom and caring were never in short supply. “Remember to seek to understand before you seek to be understood.” “By working together with others, you are going to make a positive contribution to the moss people in your life.” And very succinctly, “To serve is to live.”

He took his servant leadership approach to Ford after Bill Ford recruited him to turn the company around from a $17-billion loss. Through a process in which he demonstrated his commitment to a culture change that encouraged transparency so as to solve problem — a stark variance from the more usual corporate practice of hiding problems so as to CYA — Alan secured buy-in from everyone and “we were well on our way to creating an exciting and viable profit going forward. And so, everything that we ran into, we all knew that if we used this working together -- and included everybody and we respected everybody and appreciated them and created this safe environment where they could share everything and be a part of the team instead of being all by themselves.” His point was that no matter what happened, the team would not only able to save Ford but also create an exciting and profit company going forward -- “delivering value for everybody.” 

Providing dramatic validation for the value of respecting people as a way to do business, Alan demonstrated at Boeing and Ford that the way to turn around the company was to focus on the people. He was a leader in the Social Capital movement long before we put the name to it, and we are pleased to honor him for that leadership.