Hackett was an oddball choice from the beginning. His CV included stints as the youngest chief executive to lead furniture manufacturer Steelcase, and interim athletic director at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. He was a member of the Ford board of directors, and spent just over a year running the automaker's Smart Mobility arm when chairman Bill Ford offered him the big chair.
But Ford stood ill-equipped to capitalize on new opportunities in connected cars, electrification, and autonomy. As with other mature, multinational automakers, Ford's European operations were struggling against a flat market. It lagged behind VW and General Motors in the Chinese market. Even the cash-cow North American business had issues: It was highly dependent on profitable F-Series pickups, but weighed down by slow-selling sedans and aging SUV platforms.
Externally, it looked as though Hackett had been right all along: He wasn't the right fit. Critics certainly thought so. Apart from an element of ageism — Hackett's maturity in no way affected his quite youthful enthusiasm, and he sounded at times as though he was purpose-built to bridge a gap between Motown and Silicon Valley — he didn't seem heavy-handed enough to drag Ford into its second century.
His master plan, then, was no less than to redesign Ford. And to a degree, with his thinking guided by gurus from far outside the car business, he succeeded far better than any CEO in Ford's recent history. Mulally mortgaged all of Ford's assets to ride out the Great Recession, but he also pushed the automaker to develop smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles that consumers shunned amid a post-recessionary collapse in gas prices.
He made whole Ford team confused and frustrated WTF he was talking about and WTF he wanted to do, from the top to bottom. Take an maybe inappropriate figurative, if Alan Mulally was President Lincoln to Ford, then Hackett is Trump.
No, he didn’t. Even he did, only in the bad way. He shouldn’t in that position in the first place. He lack of basic knowledge of car industry (which you won’t need to be a “car guy” necessarily).
Really? Like the women on executive row are executives, not secretaries? How many women and POC are in executive/leadership positions? I remember a good ‘ol boys club that was almost completely white men, a few men of color, and a very few women. Ford
Ford is still way behind the curve. They should take their lead from Tesla !
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