Just as it’s no miracle that a vehicle with a multitude of intricate parts can be brought together as a whole, there’s no supernatural feat in managing large and complex businesses
Alan Mulally, former CEO of Boeing and Ford, shared some of his secrets to helping huge companies with thousands of employees spread across the globe work together on complicated tasks in a Wednesday general session discussion at BNY Mellon Pershing’s 2019 INSITE conference in Phoenix.
Mulally should know—he helped oversee the development of automobiles consisting of tens of thousands of unique parts, and airplanes with more than 4 million individual parts. He also helped Ford Motor Company recover from many years of declining profits and an Asian-Pacific tsunami that inundated 70 percent of its production capacity, and shepherded the company through the global financial crisis—a time when the other two major American auto manufacturers had to be bailed out by the government.
“At the height of an airplane program, there are 600,000 to 800,000 people working on the airplane around the world,” said Mulally. “It’s important that the people are working together, know the status of their project and are collaborating to make this plane and deliver it on schedule.”
If major projects are broken down and pursued in individual disciplines or “silos,” it invites serious mistakes that could be otherwise avoided by having people work together throughout the process, said Mulally.
“Profitable Growth for All” stands as an overarching theme to Mulally’s thoughts on business and leadership, and “the only way to make revenue is to make products and services that people want.” At a major corporation, that requires a commitment to teamwork.
At the core of Mulally’s leadership methods is a weekly business plan review meeting that placed representatives of all the major stakeholders of a project in the same room to discuss where his companies were on their various projects. Mulally established guidelines for the conduct of these meetings that extended into the cultures of the companies he ran.
Put The People First
“‘People first’ is a surrogate term for ‘love them up,’” said Mulally. “All these talented people need to know how important they are, what the status of the project is, and they deserve special attention when it’s needed.”
Everyone Should Be Included
All the stakeholders of a project should be involved in its planning, said Mulally—not just employees, but also suppliers, investors, consumers and the public.