‘There is no future,’ muses Ford CEO Jim Hackett after pocketing $52mn
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@2rix+14MKAbZ4 I second that, but Mulally was not perfect. He was good at inspiring and keeping a positive attitude (something Hackett does not do). Where Mulally fell short is he allowed bad things to go on under his tenure (DPS6, 1.6L, amongst others). Lest we forget the brain drain in 2007, followed by the cuts in 2008/2009; Ford was a depressing place to work at. People were going in each week wondering if it was their last. And this was a huge chunk of Mulally's tenure.
Also the culture of Boeing has been exposed with the botched 787 Dreamliner and the 737 max defect. To say that he had no hand in it would be an understatement. He was a cutting machine at Boeing; flushed a lot of expertise. An airplane imho is a level above cars in where the severity of any failure is an automatic 10.
Fields was a lifer at Ford. He got too big for his britches and the family cut him loose. I do think he had empathy for Ford workers but I could be wrong. Rumor was he was instrumental in ensuring people got packages, Mulally just wanted to cut them with nothing. Don't know the truth to this just heard it at the time. Also wanted to play ball with Trump; which the family did not like. Additionally the Google deal fell through, but I wonder if the deal would of hurt Ford in the end.
If you weren't at Ford for Mulally, you missed something/someone special!
Ford cycles through
Loses focus on its core business
Nearly bankrupts itself
Laser focuses on core business
Returns to profitability
Spends money with wild abandon
Repeat
The concern this time is Ford has yet to laser focus on its core business
Early on Toyota learned from Ford. Time for Ford to learn from Toyota.
Keep your eye on the ball. Incremental improvements sustained for the long haul.
We need another Mulally.
It's the perverse CEO culture of this country. These people have no empathy for how bad decisions effect the employees, dealers, customers, investors, cities/states where they do business, etc. What incentive is there for Hackett to do better when he makes 276x the median pay of the employees? That's pretty impressive pulling in $52 million, all while the company never turned the corner from the supposed bad job under Fields (putting it in retrospect, wasn't that bad at all).
What did the Ford family think was going to happen when you take away money from your bread and butter and toss it to the wind (Rivian, Argo, Spin, Chariot, train station, etc.) ? Companies are not agile like people who consult think they should be. Take the evolution of engines. Carburetors dominated for 85 years, and it wasn't till the late 1980s the industry fully adapted to fuel injection. Now how in a few short years can the company adapt to EV and Autonomous? We have better computational computing, but I doubt we are smarter than 30 years ago. Technology is not a light switch (thanks Jim for the inspiration), it evolves, it becomes more acceptable from a business case standpoint.