The story of how Ford dragged itself out of a death spiral and back to being profitable will fill the text books of business schools for decades to come. At base, it really seems simple. Design better cars, build them for a good price, market them to the public. Trouble is, a lot of stuff happens in between.
There hasn’t been a better example of “right guy, right time” than Alan Mulally in recent decades. He had both the guts and the vision to see through a plan that would shrink the company’s operations, leverage all the physical and intellectual property it had, and redesign or introduce a slew of new models at an accelerated pace. He also had the stones to change the corporate culture of the company which was strangling itself to death.
There are some awesome quotes in the story we found talking about the basic steps taken to turn the company around, but none were better than this one,
The right person was Alan Mulally – then halfway across the country running Boeing’s commercial airplanes division. When the two men finally connected they clicked immediately. But inside Ford headquarters, not everyone was sold on Mulally. Ford recalled that some executives wondered aloud whether Mulally had the right background or fully understood how complex the company was.
“And Alan said, “Yeah, I think I do have a sense of how complex it is,” said Ford. “’You make a vehicle that has 3,000 moving parts. I make one that has 30,000 moving parts and has to stay in the air. So talk to me about difficulty and complexity.’ And that kind of shut everybody up.”
We’re glad to see Ford making some dough and continuing to stay involved with racing, performance cars, and the fans of automotive performance. Their display at SEMA this year was very impressive, interactive, and in our opinion, far better than GMs. It is clear who has their mojo working and who is still turning the corner in the domestic car business.
Ford ain’t skeered of anything right now, and we dig that.
Source — MSNBC.com — The Story Behind Ford’s Recovery
