Ford’s new CEO not wasting any time
Jim Hackett has big plans for first 100 days
Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett knows the clock is already ticking on his tenure and intends to make a difference in his first 100 days.
Hackett, 62, who replaced Mark Fields as CEO last month, has begun with a mandate from Executive Chairman Bill Ford to speed up the automaker’s decision-making and wants to instill an increased focus on innovation.
“Every CEO that starts has a 100-day clock ticking. ... So I am working on a 100-day plan that is really coming along nicely,” Hackett said.
His short-term goals include looking at revenue opportunities for Ford and making sure the company is getting an acceptable return on its investments.
In his first extensive interview since his appointment, Hackett talked about his view of the technology and design necessary for the public to embrace self-driving cars, his passion for understanding how technology shapes the way people live and work and how he hopes to change Ford’s corporate culture.
Hackett said he and Bill Ford want to “create a flatter structure so that it doesn’t feel the weight of hierarchy on every decision.”
Hackett is an outgoing peopleperson and a technology geek who likes to attend TED Talks, which are meccas for technology entrepreneurs and design trendsetters but are sometimes mocked as self-important displays of intellectualism.
He is respected for an inclusive management style and prefers to hold meetings with groups of people small enough that no more than two pizzas are required to feed them. His model for leadership was influenced in college while playing football for legendary University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler.
“The first initial thing you get from him is a very clear and dynamic leadership style that was based on integrity,” Hackett said of Schembechler.
Hackett and Bill Ford have already restructured Ford Motor’s top management team to give more authority to top Ford executives.
Early in his career, Hackett left his job at Procter & Gamble in the 1980s to work for Grand Rapids furniture manufacturer Steelcase.
“The culture was a little too stiff for me (at Procter & Gamble), and when my wife told me you could call the CEO of Steelcase by his first name, I was amazed that you could do that,” Hackett said. 100-DAY SPRINT Fostering a fun, loose work environment doesn’t mean the intensity of working for a global automaker under pressure from Wall Street to boost its stock price will diminish. His four goals for the first 100 days are to:
Re- evaluate revenue opportunities. Evaluate the “fitness of the company.” Re- evaluate capital deployment.
Renew focus on innovation. Hackett pointed to the company’s decision to exit Japan last year as an example of a smart decision to conserve money instead of spending it in a place where Ford had no hope of gaining significant market share.
“The good news is, we have plenty of capital. ... The sources of capital are not the problem. It’s the uses,” Hackett said.
Hackett wants to eliminate some of the bureaucracy that can slow product development and other decisions. His desire to create a flatter business structure is evident in the way that he and Bill Ford have restructured the company’s top management ranks.
While 18 executives report directly to Fields, only eight report directly to Hackett. Hackett said he believes meetings with too many people tend to get bogged down. FOOTBALL PLAYER AND TECHNOLOGY GEEK Hackett, who played football at Michigan in the 1970s, is a technology geek who is fascinated by the ways people interact with new computers, phones and other gadgets.
He began his quest for a deeper understanding of technology in the 1980s with a desire to understand how the personal computer would change the way people work and the office furniture used to do that work.
At Steelcase, he led the furniture manufacturer through a massive change in the 1990s as the work environment changed dramatically. His 18-month stint as the University of Michigan’s interim athletic director gave him an even higher public profile, especially after he led the charge to hire Jim Harbaugh to coach the football team. PARALLELS BETWEEN HACKETT AND MULALLY The parallels between Hackett and Alan Mulally, who became Ford’s CEO in 2006, are hard to miss.
Mulally, a former Boeing executive, also came to Ford as an outsider to the automotive industry from another manufacturing company. Mulally, like Hackett, had a deep bond with Bill Ford. And Mulally, like Hackett, was tasked with the job of transforming Ford’s corporate culture.
The differences are also obvious. Ford was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2006 and losing billions of dollars, and its corporate politics were legendary for its backstabbing. Hackett arrives at a time when the company has been making billions in annual profits, has a much stronger lineup of cars and trucks and is a far more integrated global company. ‘I AM A DESIGN THINKER’ Hackett said he believes the way people are able to interact with and use technology is just as important to the ultimate success of a product as its technical potential.
“I am not a designer,” Hackett said. “I am a design thinker. ... Design is about the acuity of understanding use.”
From that viewpoint, Hackett — who also led Ford’s new mobility division for a year — said that most of the news media have been looking at autonomous vehicles the wrong way.
“We are writing too much about the robot and not enough about the human,” Hackett said.