Alan Mulally - President and CEO, Commercial Airplanes, The Boeing Company

Alan Mulally is executive vice president of The Boeing Company, and president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He is responsible for all of the company's commercial airplane programs and related services, with sales of more than $22.4 billion in 2003. Additionally, Mulally is the senior executive for The Boeing Company in the Pacific Northwest, and a member of the Boeing Executive Council.

Mulally joined Boeing in 1969 and progressed through a number of significant engineering and program-management assignments, including contributions on the 727, 737, 747, 757 and 767 airplanes. In 1978, Boeing named Mulally as Engineering Employee of the Year, and the National Society of Professional Engineers chose him as Industry Engineer of the Year. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce selected him for its Leadership Tomorrow Program in 1984. In 1985, the Puget Sound Business Journal honored him as one of the 25 business leaders for the 1990s.

Excerpt from the interview:      [ Read the full interview here ]

Prasad: Can you tell me something about your journey? Do you remember any significant events that shaped your life?

Alan: I was a liberal arts major when I was starting out in college. And John F Kennedy was on the TV one night and he said we are going to the moon. And he said it is bigger than going to the moon. Nobody has gone to the moon and I was very excited. And it was about… we are searching for the meaning of the universe and meaning of life and how did creation happened and we are gonna take one step into one little planet that is close… and so we are gonna take this first step.

So it was not about going to the moon but it was about what we are going to learn about ourselves. It’s about the boundaries that we are gonna push. We are gonna learn about ourselves, we are gonna learn about technology, it’s gonna be large scale, it’ gonna take a lot of people’s minds and we are gonna benefit. The society will benefit from the reaching out of new knowledge. The technology is gonna be big…. So in one month I switched over from liberal arts to engineering. Because the astronauts they wanted were engineers because they were creating this and they needed engineers to create this… [they said] we may need pilots and so I went out got a pilot’s license. I joined the air force. So I went from liberal arts to calculus, physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics, and it was all so different and I loved it all because it married liberal arts with this global challenge/contribution of going to the moon. I was doing great in the program, I was an astronaut and I found that I had color blindness between colors of grey.

They were going to land on the moon that always has grey colors and you have to manually fly and so that might be an issue. So I couldn’t go on. I was in aeronautical and astranautical engineering and my thesis advisor was the head of aeronautics in Boeing and so he said “Allan”… I was in a state of despair... and he said “Let me show you a different vision, talented people that were making these planes and how sophisticated these planes were that take people half way around the world safely and he said, “You have a talent. You could combine the engineering with design and creativity… you like working with people and you could really make a big contribution.

It seemed very compelling going down that road. And I got here. I got a chance to travel and be in every country. It helped my desire to be one with the world. I know this sounds too corny but then all of a sudden it was like my gosh it was holistic, it was one life now. I had all these pieces – airplane design, creativity, science, art, physics, people, linking… so it was like I was home. We were all creating this together and always stressed out and I was at peace. I was in the middle of this and [I said to myself] if we get everybody focused, bring together customers, viewpoints around the world, it will be ok.