Charlie Rose Talks to Alan Mulally

You’ve recently received a number of CEO of the Year awards. What makes a great CEO?
It’s a little bit hard for me to answer that. But from a process point of view, I think one of the things they’re recognizing is the fact that we pulled together around a very compelling vision. We also developed a comprehensive strategy to transform Ford. And then, of course, we’ve been relentlessly implementing it. So I think that having a point of view about the future, having a vision, pulling everybody into that, and then having a comprehensive strategy in delivering are really important contributions.

Ford survived the financial crisis without a bailout. What are the consequences of being rescued for GM and Chrysler?
Well, there are some real advantages of going into bankruptcy, because they got restructured. Clearly the biggest was the debt—their debt was essentially removed. Our plan is to remove that disadvantage by repaying our debt based on the strength of our products and our profitability. This is the most exciting thing about our [July 26] earnings announcement. We’ve repaid another $2.6 billion of our loans … which means that in the last year and a half we have repaid $20 billion of the $23.5 billion that we borrowed [in 2006]. So we are getting very close now to investment grade and being on our way. Even though we were disadvantaged over the last two years, we are removing the disadvantage.