Alan Mulally led one of the most celebrated corporate turnarounds in business history. As President and CEO of Ford Motor Company from 2006 to 2014, he took a company posting the worst losses in its history — more than $12 billion — and guided it back to profitability as the only major American automaker to avoid bankruptcy and a government bailout during the financial crisis. Before Ford, he spent more than three decades at Boeing, rising from engineer to CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where he led the development of the 777 and is widely credited with the company's resurgence against Airbus.
An aerospace engineer by training, with degrees from the University of Kansas and an MIT Sloan master's in management, Mulally has been named to Time's 100 Most Influential People, ranked No. 3 on Fortune's "World's Greatest Leaders," and named among Barron's "World's Best CEOs." His leadership of Ford is chronicled in the bestselling book American Icon, and he later served on the board of directors of Google. Across both Boeing and Ford, his impact rests on a single, transferable idea: a disciplined system for getting talented people to work together.