The story of the man who saved Ford
NEW YORK — Like aging empires, the “Big Three” Detroit automakers slogged along the same downward trajectory for decades, with unrealistic labour contracts, Byzantine bureaucracies and a general complacency crippling them in the face of international competition.
The decline culminated, of course, with the bankruptcies and governmentsponsored bailouts of two of them, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler, in 2009, in the dark days of the recession.
All survived. But only Ford Motor Company can say it did so on its own, mortgaging its corporate logo in the process, as journalist Bryce G. Hoffman describes in his book American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company.
As the title suggests, the prime mover in Ford’s epic turnaround was Mulally, an inveterate optimist from Kansas with a wholesome grin whom Hoffman likens to Richie Cunningham, the all-american boy from the Happy Days sitcom.
The author was given generous access to spend a year visiting the CEO’S office and the offices of many of his disciples, learning that Mulally’s success did not hinge on an in-depth knowledge of a complex and dysfunctional business.
Instead, he built a comeback on the power of a consistent message, meaningful language and accountability.
When he arrived at Ford in 2006, Mulally had no experience in the auto industry. But he had won praise for turning around Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes Group, which, like Ford, required him to transform a divisive corporate culture while fending off foreign rivals, the author writes.
Hoffman describes how, after assuming the helm at Ford, Mulally dramatically transformed the corporate culture, starting with top management.
Ford executives once could fiddle on their Blackberrys while underlings did their bidding at high-level meetings. Not any more. Mulally reformed Ford’s confusing and cumbersome command structure with a “matrix” he’d used at Boeing designed to boost communication among business unit executives and the CEO, Hoffman writes.
“Executives had been accustomed to dealing only with the big picture,” says Hoffman, who began covering Ford for the Detroit News in 2005. “Now they were being asked to explain the minutest details of their divisions.”
Hoffman in his book thanks Ford executives for their cooperation and access in putting together his narrative — a portrait one auto industry blogger said reads like “an extended length director’s cut of a Ford press release.”
To be sure, Hoffman doesn’t include, or failed to dig up, all of the gruesome and embarrassing details behind Mulally’s bloody and imperfect turnaround.
But Hoffman relates many fly-on-the-wall accounts of Mulally negotiating deals and Ford overcoming challenges from inside and out.
The author also paints a portrait of a leader whose almost childlike simplicity confounded a city that has long found it impossible to get out of its own way.
American Icon does read like a tribute to Ford Motor Co and Mulally. But it also amounts to a paean to the ingenuity, grit and optimism that once defined American industry and to capitalism played with government on the sidelines.