Taking the reins during a crisis
While the company’s health is strong today, for the first few years of Ford’s tenure, he was working against a backdrop of crisis. He assumed command of a fundamentally broken company teetering on the brink of disaster; some even think it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
"I think he was cast into this role about 10 years earlier than had been planned," says Dr. David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, an independent consulting organization. "The company was about to shut down; Jacques Nassar (his predecessor) had lost the people, the dealers, everybody. And there was no one else to do it."
Adds auto-industry analyst Mary Ann Keller, "What Bill Ford took over was a completely dysfunctional company."
During a couple of rounds of downsizing under Nassar, much of the company’s top engineering and management talent departed, Keller says. She dates the beginning of the company’s problems to the tenure of an earlier president, Alex Trottman. While things looked rosy for the company at the time — by the late ’80s it was outselling the larger GM for the first time since the ’20s — the company lost its focus while using its $10 billion in excess cash to diversify into an array of related businesses.
In the hunt for the next grand management theme, the company "essentially dismantled the operating structures and financial staffs of the foreign divisions and brought it all back to Dearborn," Keller says. "In addition to being a terrible, failed strategy, they lost a lot of talent that they’ve been trying to replace ever since."
So how does one fix an iconic, century-old American company that’s very nearly on its knees?
"You do that by going back to basics," says Keller.
And Bill Ford has done that with abandon. Gone are the big themes and grand unifying visions. And despite his personal interest in the Internet — he had the Detroit Lions online before other NFL teams when he ran the family-owned franchise in the ’90s — he tossed out earlier grand Internet strategies. Instead, the company has returned to its core mission — building and selling cars the public wants.
"The immediate challenge in the last few years was stabilizing our business and getting it back on a sound operational and financial foundation," Ford says. "We’ve accomplished that, and I’m very proud of the way our team stepped up and did it."
