Alan Mulally — one of the most successful businessmen to come from the University of Kansas and Lawrence High School — wasn’t feeling much success soon after he became president and CEO of Ford Motor Co. in 2006.

“The first forecast I saw after taking the job was for a $17 billion loss,” Mulally told a crowd of several hundred people Thursday at the Lied Center as part of the KU Business School’s Anderson Chandler Lecture. “And four months later ,we achieved that.”

Part of Mulally’s turnaround plan at Ford was weekly meetings with Ford’s top leaders. He asked leaders to present a series of charts, each color coded — green showed issues that were going well, yellow were issues that were challenging but had been solved, and red were problems that didn’t yet have answers. For the first several meetings, every single chart was green.

“I finally stopped and said, ‘I know and now you know that we are going to lose $17 billion,'” Mulally recalled. “‘Are there maybe just a couple of things that aren’t going well?'”

Eventually red charts started appearing in the meetings, leaders would offer their expertise to help solve the problems, and Ford went on to post a record financial turnaround and was the only one of the Big Three automakers that did not take federal money to survive the Great Recession. Mulally retired from Ford in 2014 and now serves on the board of directors for Google, among other companies.

“I knew right then that we were going to be OK,” Mulally said of when the red charts started appearing. “Not only were we going to save Ford, but we were going to be able to handle anything that came our way because we were working together.”

In addition to the lecture, Mulally — who is a Lawrence native who has his engineering degrees from KU — answered questions from students for about a half hour. Among other topics he discussed:

• He urged universities to teach in more multidisciplinary ways, and said he believed KU was ahead of the curve in that effort.

• He said the auto industry is going through exciting times with the idea of self-driving vehicles, but he said the ethical challenges of self-driving cars may create as many challenges as the technological issues.

“All the situations you can imagine a car getting into, you have to write an algorithm to tell the car what to do,” Mulally said. “Imagine a car is driving along and a pedestrian steps out in front of the car, but another car is coming at you in the other lane. What does the car do?”

The lecture series is named for Anderson Chandler, a KU alumnus and successful Kansas banker. The engineering school’s Self Engineering Leadership Fellows program also sponsored the free lecture.