Mulally perfectly fits Boeing’s CEO criteria

It was a warm Saturday morning in June 2001, and for me things were not going well.

I’d overslept and was running late, cursing the weekend traffic on I-5 as I drove toward Seattle and wishing I hadn’t had time for that extra cup of coffee before I left.

I was on my way to meet Alan Mulally at the rollout of the 307 Stratoliner, the beautiful 1930s-vintage airliner that a team of volunteers had restored at Boeing’s historic Plant 2 on East Marginal Way S. in Seattle.

This was a few weeks after Boeing Chairman Phil Condit had announced plans to move Boeing headquarters to Chicago. Mulally was going to be Boeing’s top guy in the Northwest once Condit left, and this would be my first chance to talk with him.

I got there, wandered through the impressively restored Stratoliner a couple of times and made small talk with people, most of it centered on who was moving to Chicago and who wasn’t, and how much longer it would be before Boeing left Puget Sound completely.

Then Mulally arrived, his teen-age daughter in tow. He smiled and shook hands all around, and just before the ceremony was to start there was a break in the clouds, which made the hand-shaped aluminum skin of the old airplane gleam.

Mulally stepped up to the microphone, and with that shiny plane as a backdrop, gave an upbeat speech in which he proclaimed, with a wink and a sly nod, that no matter what, Seattle was still “the world headquarters of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.” The crowd – a couple of hundred airplane buffs clutching souvenir pictures of the restored 307 – laughed and cheered.

Afterward, I waited with a few other reporters for Mulally to join us. We had a long list of questions about the future of Boeing.

But then something extraordinary happened. A Boeing mechanic came up to ask Mulally to autograph his souvenir picture. Someone else saw that Mulally was signing, and within about two minutes a long line had formed, most of them Boeing workers, all of them wanting an autograph, a handshake or both.

I’d never seen anything like it. Think of it, have you ever wanted your boss’s signature on anything other than a paycheck? This Mulally guy, I mused, must really be something.

I’ve been thinking of that day a lot, since Boeing’s board of directors forced out Harry Stonecipher and announced it was seeking a new CEO.

Since that early summer Saturday in 2001, Mulally has led Boeing’s commercial jet business through some gut-wrenching changes: massive layoffs, contentious contract talks, and shifts in methods and processes that have changed the way everyone at Boeing does their job.

Mulally also was left to pick up the pieces here after Condit left for Chicago. He patched things up so well that he was able to scold Puget Sound business and government leaders – in his famous 2002 “stop whining” speech at the University of Washington Business School – and get a standing ovation for it.

Mulally has something that Condit and Stonecipher lacked – star power. Mulally is a better public speaker than most of the politicians I’ve met in almost two decades of listening to campaign speeches.

And the best I can tell, short of running a criminal background check, Mulally doesn’t lead a personal life that would embarrass the company. I called a couple of people who know him, and they swore by his personal and professional integrity, calling him a family man, a team builder and an honest broker.

Mulally’s no saint. He’s got an ego and ambition. The big knock on him is he’s too old. He’ll be 60 this summer, and that’s closing in on Boeing’s mandatory retirement age of 65.

But after a string of scandals stemming from moves by former McDonnell Douglas executives, insiders say Mulally has the advantage of being an old-school Boeing guy. That could be key to restoring employee morale and investor confidence.

To recap, in Mulally, Boeing has a top-flight engineer with CEO-level experience and a reputation for integrity. He’s politically adept, media savvy and incredibly charismatic, and as one fan of his told me, “He knows how to build the freakin’ jets.”

Memo to Boeing’s board: Hire him.

Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.