LOL. You think? Finger pointing, backstabbing, credit stealing and blame placing are key Ford skills. Those who excel in those key skills are quickly promoted.
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It won’t change as the leadership stack up to and including the CEO excel at finger pointing. Mulally made great headways into everyone working together as One Forward.
That was all dismantled by subsequent leaders Fields, Hackett and Farley.
Many had a front row seat to CarCar sniping and undermining Hendrichs, all while projecting a cooperative and concerned image publicly. Two Jims is a master at that.
Good luck to Josh, he will soon find out he has no true support from the leadership stack.
Sadly, the finger pointing will continue as long as there is no accountability at the LL levels.
Everyone can read a similar version (or maybe exact - Free Cr-p may have just stole it from here) of the story: https://fordauthority.com/2022/04/ford-quality-issues-now-being-tackled-by-former-j-d-power-executive/?msclkid=533f95aeb67411ecb3893e889afd40c5
I wish Josh well...I really do. However, I don't know if he has any idea what kind of buzz saw he is running head first into. "Everyone must work together to solve problems" what could be the problems with that approach? Well...
- For starters, how is he going to get the suppliers onboard with this plan...the same very ones we nickel and dime repeatedly over the years and in survey after survey year after year rate Ford as the worst manufacturer to work with? WE would have to be willing to pay more for quality to be designed into the parts & processes, be willing to be more proactive in working with suppliers and limiting number of changes to parts/designs long before job1, and really partner with them. We have not be very good about this in a very long time.
- What is the plan to actually get internal teams to work better together? It is not the teams per say, it is the mis-match of goals and metrics that are all over the place and are not consistent across the different skill areas much les down to the individual team level. Without the same goals and metrics applied consistently in all areas of the company, this is a non starter because in reality those that have been here longer than a year or two know we are really graded and rewarded on our individual group/team goals and the corporate goals only matter at bonus time. How is Josh going to address this part of the equation?
- To point number 2, the only way to get really rewarded in this company is a promotion and/or the company has a really good year and you get a nice bonus. Neither of those address the efforts of teams really working together to pull off a new model launch or new software launch with few or any major problems....what about providing a supplemental bonus to such team? You can have a great launch and the company still does bad overall due to no fault of the launch team. Not everyone wants to be a L5 or L4. What if the issues show up in year 2 after launch, as many issue do - how do you handle that - do they penalize the suppliers, designers, engineers, or instead offer then an additional bonus to work out the issue quickly and professional by working together? (after all, it could actually be real world use cases that could not be predicted ahead of time that are causing the issues) They have never really addressed any of these issue to my knowledge.
I really could go on and on - think the above is enough food for thought on why unless the issues above and others are address, this is another bandage attempt to fix a longer term issue of too many reorgs with too many people pushed out and too much cost cutting finally catching up with the company.