I have found no better case study than Ford CEO Alan Mulally.  This recent Fortune Magazine cover story provides a wealth of insights in how he leads.  Large global complex program leaders…read and learn.

“Now he’s showing me the corporate mission statement he wrote and had printed on plastic cards and distributed to employees. And here is the hand-drawn diagram he’s created just for me (with my name in a cloudburst!) to explain what it all means. In case I hadn’t noticed, Mulally says, “I went to a lot of work for this.” Trust me, Alan, I noticed.

All this attention is wearing me out – but not Mulally. In the midst of history’s second-worst auto depression, Mulally seems to be … enjoying himself? This is a man who lives less than three miles from his office, arrives there each morning at 5:15 a.m. for a 12-hour workday, and does so with smile. At 63, he still gets enthusiastic about tackling big jobs. “I’ve always wanted to do something important, and it had to be in a big organization,” says Mulally.”

June 15 – 19 SAPM Stanford Courses at Stanford Campus

Converting Strategy Into Action (CSIA)  June 15 – 17

Managing Without Authority (MWA) June 15 – 17

Leading Effective Teams (LET) June 17 – 19

Build Winning Stakeholder Commitments (BWSC) formerly called Leveraging the Customer Relationship (LCR) June 17 – 19

SAVE over $250! Register by May 6th to take advantage of the Early Registration discount.

Call 1-866-802-1152 or visit SAPM online.

Stanford Technology Venture Program’s Entrepreneurship Corner provides free videos and podcasts (view or download) that are useful in discussing various aspects of leading and being part of large global teams, especially from the perspective of executing strategy.  For example:

• Carly Fiorina , formerly HP CEO
• Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, Google
• Marissa Mayer, Google
• Mark  Zuckerberg, Facebook
• Carol Bartz, Yahoo

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If your work in China or lead project-based work involving China, its citizens, its business, place a recent McKinsey Global Institute study on Chinese cities, Preparing for China’s Urban Billion, on your reading list.  The Executive Summary (37 pages) is good place to start.

Executive summary

If current trends hold, nearly one billion people will live in urban centers by 2025, bringing enormous pressure points to many cities, including the challenges of securing sufficient public funding for the provision of social services and dealing with demand and supply pressures on land, energy, water, and the environment. MGI finds that a more concentrated pattern of urbanization is most likely to mitigate pressures and increase the overall productivity of the urban system, while encouraging “urban productivity” initiatives at the city level could also generate substantial positive outcomes in all scenarios.