ALAN MULALLY is said to be “nervous but not afraid” of the challenge of taking over the top job at Ford.
His name came to the top of Billy Ford’s list of target chief executives, despite his lack of Detroit experience, because he has a proven track record in industrial turnaround at Boeing’s commercial aerospace headquarters in Seattle.
The Kansas-born 61-year- old was introduced to Ford employees as someone who “knows what it’s like to have your back to the wall”. The troubles at Ford — huge pension and healthcare obligations and falling sales for the company’s most profitable models — are not a million miles from the problems faced by Boeing, which was forced to address a bloated workforce in the face of plunging sales after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Like Ford, Boeing lost market share to its arch rival, although it has managed to reverse that position, at least in numbers of orders, in the past year.
Mr Mulally’s experience restructuring Boeing after 9/11 will provide one of the closest parallels to Ford. He cut the workforce of the Commercial Airplanes division to 70,000 from 120,000, while reducing the time taken to build a typical airliner by half and introducing the fastest-selling new aircraft ever, the 787 Dreamliner.
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Mr Mulally has some familiarity with the car industry because he used its lean manufacturing techniques to great effect at Boeing. He sent executives to Japan to visit Toyota and other carmakers, then brought Japanese consultants to Seattle to help to transform Boeing’s factories into moving assembly lines.
Boeing also copied the car industry in sourcing components from overseas suppliers. “People used to say that you couldn’t do with airplanes what the automobile factories do with cars, but in the end it’s all about manufacturing,” Mr Mulally said in an interview last year.
Despite these sweeping changes, union leaders say that Mr Mulally treated the workforce with respect, which gave him the credibility to lead. He puts union relations high on his list of priorities and will need to continue to do so at the motor company.
He is also an old hand when it comes to product innovation, becoming known as the father of the twin-aisle Boeing 777 in the 1990s. The ability to direct a clear product strategy will be essential at Ford, which needs to restore a product line too dependent on big lorries and to close some big factories.
A lively presenter at air shows, dressed in company blazer and slacks, Mr Mulally seemed to be a consummate Boeing man. At the Farnborough Air Show this year, he gave his regular pre-show briefing on the commercial division, showing no pain at having been passed over for the top job at the company he had devoted his life to. Industry observers believe that Jim McNerney, the former 3M chief executive, was favoured because of a need to bring in fresh blood and shake up the entrenched Boeing culture, rather than any deficiencies on Mr Mulally’s part.
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Mr McNerney, now Boeing’s president and chief executive, did try to persuade Mr Mullaly to stay. However, according to his old boss, it was clear “there was an itch he had to scratch” — a yearning to run a large company.