WMBA 6605 Week 10 Leader Case Analysis Example

Applause for a Red Slide: Testing the Story of Alan Mulally's Turnaround at Ford Against What Hoffman's Account Documents, What It Interprets and What It Leaves Out, and the One Lesson That Survives the Test

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Walden University

WMBA 6605: Finding Your Inner Leader

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Month Day, Year

Applause for a Red Slide: Testing the Story of Alan Mulally's Turnaround at Ford Against What Hoffman's Account Documents, What It Interprets and What It Leaves Out, and the One Lesson That Survives the Test

The Case and Its Source

This paper examines Alan Mulally's tenure as chief executive of Ford Motor Company from 2006, using Bryce Hoffman's book American Icon (Hoffman, 2012) as its main source. Hoffman was a business journalist covering the automotive industry, and he had extensive access to Mulally and other Ford executives while writing. That access makes the account rich and also shapes it: much of what we know about the private meetings comes from the recollections of people who had reasons to remember them well.

What Mulally Did

Hoffman documents several actions that are not in dispute. Mulally came to Ford from Boeing in September 2006, when Ford was heading toward a 2006 net loss of about $12.7 billion. Within months, Ford arranged about $23.6 billion in financing, pledging most of its assets, including its trademark, as collateral, which gave it cash to survive the 2008 and 2009 downturn without the government bailout and bankruptcy that General Motors and Chrysler went through.

Mulally also instituted a weekly Business Plan Review, a Thursday meeting in which each senior executive reported progress on their part of the plan using slides color-coded green, yellow or red. According to Hoffman, for the first several weeks every slide was green, even as the company lost billions. Then Mark Fields, head of the Americas business, showed a red slide for the delayed launch of the Ford Edge, held up by a problem with the vehicle's liftgate. Mulally applauded and asked who could help. In the following weeks, other executives began showing red.

Separating Action From Interpretation

The documented actions are the financing, the meeting structure and the "One Ford" plan to consolidate the company's global operations. The financial results are a matter of public record.

The famous moment, the applause for a red slide, is different in kind. It rests on the recollections of executives in the room, gathered years later by a writer who admired the result. It may be accurate in every detail, but it is the kind of evidence this course has taught me to treat with care: a vivid episode, recalled by participants, offered as proof of a cultural transformation. Hoffman's interpretation is that this moment changed Ford's culture from one of hiding problems to one of surfacing them. That interpretation is plausible and consistent with later results, but the book cannot show that the meeting, rather than the financial crisis, the loan or the collapse of competitors, was the cause.

The same test I applied to my own claim applies here. What evidence supports the claim that Mulally created a culture of transparency? The weekly meeting, the shift in slide colors and the recollections of participants. Which of it is self-reported? Most of the cultural evidence. What does the account leave out? The executives who left, the managers below the top team for whom the meeting may have meant little and the role of luck in the timing of the 2006 financing, arranged before credit markets froze.

What the Case Supports

Even with those cautions, the case supports one claim about leadership well. People report bad news when the cost of reporting it is visibly lower than the cost of hiding it. Edmondson (1999) found that work teams whose members felt they could raise problems without being punished showed more learning behavior, including open discussion of errors. Detert and Burris (2007) reported that staff raised concerns more often where they saw their managers as genuinely open. Whatever the exact details of the Fields moment, the structure Mulally built made the cost of a red slide explicit, and his response set its price.

What the Account Leaves Uncertain

A careful reader should also hold open the possibility that the story is told backward from the result. Ford survived, so the meetings that preceded its survival are remembered as the cause. Had Ford failed, the same weekly review might have been described as rearranging slides while the company burned. Hoffman's reporting is thorough, but no single account can rule out that reading.

The Comparison

Comparing myself with a chief executive of a global automaker requires care, but the comparison is about mechanism, not scale. I have access to things about myself that no biographer has about Mulally: what I felt when a team member brought me a problem, what I wanted to say before I said something else, the decisions I almost made. Hoffman had only what Mulally and others chose to tell him and what the record shows.

That access cuts both ways. It means I can examine motives a biographer cannot. It also means I am the least neutral witness to my own behavior, which is why my feedback from seven colleagues was more useful than my own account. Mulally's story is told mostly from his side and his supporters'. Mine, until this term, was told only from mine.

The Lesson That Survives

One lesson survives the test and applies directly to my work. My strength is building structure, and Mulally's Business Plan Review was, at bottom, a structure: a weekly calendar with owners and colors. The structure alone did nothing for weeks, because everyone showed green. What changed the meeting was the leader's response to the first red slide.

My close calendar has the same weakness. It tells me when a task is late but not why, and it depends on people telling me about problems early. In June, when an analyst asked for one night to fix her own error before I reported it, I reported it that day and named her as the person who found and was fixing it. I now see that what I did next mattered more than the reporting itself: whether the next person who finds a problem sees that bringing it to me early is safe. My structure will produce honest information only if my reaction to a red item is consistently better than my reaction to a late one.

References

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hoffman, B. G. (2012). American icon: Alan Mulally and the fight to save Ford Motor Company. Crown Business.