In my opinion one of the problems that ford has is a complete lack of geographical diversity in it's workforce. >90% of the workforce is from Michigan (pretty sure 90% of Tesla isn't from California), and that means that pretty much everyone has the exact same perspective with the exact same blindspots. Either ford should open other offices in other cities (Palo alto is a good start) or aggressively recruit the best people from other cities.
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The OP made a good point. For white collar workers like IT it should not make any difference where they work. IT teams already span multiple countries (US, UK, Germany, China, India). Most IT teams have telecommute capabilities for on-call responsibilities. As long as they have a competent, technical LL6 leading the dispersed team all goes well. The problems arise when the leadership is poor and they only know how to manage by seeing a butt in a chair.
GM allows IT teams to work from any of their data center locations which are dispersed throughout the country. This allows GM to have a larger and mote diverse talent pool to pull from.
Now I know GM has its own problems, like they brought in the entire Dell good ole boy club into their Austin data center which just recreated the problems Dell purged at GM.
However, if executed properly OP has a good suggestion.
Go Michigan!!! There are plenty of smart and hard working people here. We just need a great leader. Could someone please call Alan Mulally? NOW. PLEASE!
Yes , Fords tried that by moving the Lincoln advanced advertising and consumer sentiment team to the great California and it costs a boat load of money that ultimately failed after a few years and brought it back to Detroit.
Oh now he wants to respond with facts (referencing how many f150s sold in q4) but has no facts in his original post and crying of a “personal attack”. You need to move to Cali, you would fit in well there.
To the guy with the long comment: I don't know what's with the personal attack, I'm from here and I plan on staying here. Obviously I meant opening white collar offices, moving factories and blue collar wouldn't make any sense. And I don't mean just california (where btw we sold 55k f150s in 4q 2018). If you look at the top tech markets Detroit barely cracks top 15-20 lots of top tier engineering talent in Texas (Austin, Dallas), DC area, cali, Seattle, etc
Thumbs down
While I agree diversity is good, I think you are well out of touch. A huge chunk of Ford's workforce is blue collar in factories therefore they will live close and not be people moving across country for positions. Plus no one would move a factory to places like California or New York.
Putting a small white collar workforce in Cali would hardly make a dent in your workforce analysis. Also as far white collar workers there is a good mix of non-Michiganders here and I don't believe many if any of our executives are from here. Maybe the problem is non Midwestern people who have never picked up a tool or done physical work and who are out of touch with the hard working people buying their product is the problem?
Also this has gotta be the most out of touch comment I've seen on here. A blue collar company moving offices to Silicon Valley? No matter if we moved a few jobs there no one in Cali is ever buying a Ford 150 or Ford period anyway. Even if the F-150 becomes all electric everyone in LA and San Fran will still denounce it as a waste of space and too big. You just want Ford to become some hipster company and move you to Cali. News flash, you're in the wrong company and wrong state bud.
Yes - because Tesla is doing so great. This cat is uninformed all around.
This is the stupidest post seen to date. And you’re a dumb***, Ford already has an office in Palo Alto. Get outta here Troll!