I have been reading about Alan Mulally, former President and CEO of the Ford Motor Company. Mulally's story is fairly interesting. He was an aeronautical engineer by background and had worked for more than 30 years for Boeing. Hiring a relative industry outsider at a time when the Ford Motor Company had just lost over $12.7 billion and the price of Ford stock had dropped to $1.01 per share (prompting a few stock brokers to joke, "Did you want fries with that?" when selling Ford stock) caused a lot of head scratching. Mulally was not even the company's first choice to succeed William Clay Ford, Jr, the great-grandson of Henry Ford and the Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. At one of Mulally's first meetings with his executive leadership team, someone asked "How are you going to tackle something as complex and unfamiliar as the auto business when we are in such tough financial shape?" Mulally answered, "An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air."
A large measure of Mulally's success at Ford (see Bryce Hoffman's book, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company) was due to his leadership of change management. The fact that he virtually re-invented a company as old as Ford is a testament to his ability to share a compelling vision and create the necessary "sense of urgency" (see John Kotter's article in the Harvard Business Review, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail"). Mulally says that creating a compelling vision is one of the most important jobs that a leader can do in any organization ("Planes, Cars, and Cathedrals" by Adam Bryant, New York Times). He tells the famous story of the three bricklayers (The tale of the three bricklayers). As the story goes, a casual passerby stops to watch three bricklayers. She asks the first bricklayer, "What are you doing?" and the first bricklayer responds, "Well, I'm making a living laying these bricks." She asks the same question to the second bricklayer, who responds. "I am practicing the profession of bricklaying. I want to be the best bricklayer to ever live." Finally, she asks the same question to the third bricklayer, who responds, "I am building a cathedral." What a great story! Somehow, an effective leader has to make the connection between what his or her team is doing to the outside world. We are not just laying bricks. We are building a cathedral. What we are doing here is something much bigger than anyone of us can imagine.
I am also reminded of another famous story. As this story goes, President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA in 1962 and came across a janitor who was sweeping in the break room. President Kennedy stopped and walked over to the janitor and reached out his hand, "Hi, I am Jack Kennedy. What are you doing today?" The janitor set aside his broom, shook the President's hand, and said, "I am sending a man to the moon, Mr. President." To a casual observer, the janitor was simply doing his job and cleaning the break room. However, somewhere and somehow, the janitor's supervisor had formed a connection between what the janitor was doing and the greater mission of the entire organization (NASA) to send a man to the moon.
We as leaders need to be able to create a vision, a shared sense of purpose, and communicate that vision effectively throughout all layers of the organization. Alan Mulally was able to do that at Ford. And when the economic crisis of 2008 hit all three major U.S. automobile makers, Ford was the only company that did not have to be bailed out by the U.S. government. Through Mulally's vision (and more importantly, through his ability to communicate that vision to the rest of the organization), Ford had positioned itself in such a way that they were able to weather the storm.
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