Category: Leadership

Executive of the Year: Alan Mullaly, Ford Motor Company

Alan Mulally, president and chief executive officer of Ford Motor Company, was honored recently as Executive of the Year by the Dean’s Council of 100, a group of prominent business executives who advise the W. P. Carey School of Business. In presenting the award, W. P. Carey School Dean Robert Mittelstaedt noted Mulally’s exceptional leadership in turning Ford around without requesting government bailout money. Here is Mulally’s speech and the question period that followed.

Second look: Michael Ahearn of First Solar Inc. says Europe’s energy policies leaving U.S. behind

Today’s news included the announcement that First Solar Inc. has signed one of the largest solar photovoltaic power deals ever in the U.S. The contract with Southern California Edison has First Solar developing two solar-power projects with a combined 550 megawatts of capacity. The news prompted the Knowledge@W. P. Carey team to offer you another look at this report on First Solar founder and CEO Michael Ahearn. In a recent speech, Ahearn told how the company, based in the Phoenix desert, went abroad to the much less sunny Germany to find the market opportunity that made it one of the fastest growing manufacturers of solar modules in the world. Ahearn warned that energy policies in European Union member nations have positioned the continent to move efficiently toward a carbon-neutral model that will be a global competitive advantage in coming decades.

Your career, our economy: Stakes are high when finance professionals let ethics slide

Bernie Madoff. AIG. Allen Stanford. When Marianne Jennings talks to her undergraduate students about business ethics these days, those are the subjects they want to talk about. Not surprisingly, Jennings says, the students often take a somewhat black-and-white view of things: Madoff was a crook; Stanford was a swindler; those execs at AIG were reckless, irresponsible, and had absolutely no right to take those big bonuses — not after the carnage they caused. Blame it on the executives, the students say. It’s the guys in the executive suite who can’t be trusted. Not so fast, says Jennings. The lesson to be learned, she says, isn’t that executives have to act more ethically. Instead, it’s that everyone must act more ethically.

Podcast: Can Obama grow policy from the grassroots?

Candidate Barack Obama took grassroots networking into the digital age in his successful quest for the White House. Gerry Keim, associate dean for the W. P. Carey MBA, looks at whether President Obama can now convert his grassroots network to support his policy agenda.

Survival of the smartest: After the layoffs, manage for long-term stability

If you’re one of the millions of workers left behind after layoffs, sweating over an inflated workload, fretting that you might be next, you already know how demoralizing a "reduction in force" (RIF) can be. If you’re managing layoff survivors, you have even more reason to worry. RIFs can clobber morale, erode loyalty, stymie creativity and set your firm up for a migration of talent that could hobble you long after the economy revives. Experts at the W. P. Carey School say that now is the time to manage employee angst and solidify relationships so that once you survive this recession, you’ll be able to thrive in the recovery ahead.

Bob Anderson: Innovating from the bottom up at Best Buy

In the opening moments of Bob Anderson’s presentation at a recent conference sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Business through Information Technology, the IT executive used the words "innovation" or "innovative" or "innovate" seven times. He has reasons to harp on that theme. Now chief technologist for Best Buy Co., Inc., the nation’s largest consumer electronics outlet, Anderson defines innovative thinking as creative, inventive, radical and fearless. And when you’re a retailer of products sold by everyone from Sears to Circuit City, coming up with new and better ways to service customers is crucial to survival, he said.