|
|||
|
Back to the Forum Archives Holy crap, William Clay, please stop running those stupid brain dead commercials with vehicles driving through the stratosphere and swimming underwater. Please do not show that idiotic commercial of a truck towing an icebreaker. Another one, the vehicle driving around on a slippery carrier deck and playing chicken with the edge, is particularly silly. There are several others that are just as dumb. These ads are stupid and unbelievable. As a retired Ford employee, I am embarrassed by them. Please stop embarrassing me with that silliness. Those unbelievably dishonest commercials are not going to help us. They will hurt us with anyone who has half a mind. Why don't you spend that Madison Avenue money to create a new product. Drop the me-too looks and give the public something to buy. You stole the march with the Taurus, but you have not had anything really new since then. You hunkered down on the Taurus and froze the company in time. Between you, Firestone, Bush, and that fool Jacques my invested savings is worth about one third of what it was last year. Yes, most of my investment was in Ford stock. I will get by, but some others I know are not so lucky. Some who were depending on Ford will likely have to sell property to make up the short fall. They can't wait it out. They will have to take serious personal loses. Sure, I blame Bush and Firestone and the damn Nader look-alike do-gooders who deliberately and maliciously misrepresented the facts, but, most of all, I blame you, William Clay Ford. I trusted you to take care of business. You have betrayed that trust. The pundits say that Nasser took his eye off of the core business and let it slip. I must ask what were you doing at the time? Were you playing at being a football coach? I do keep in touch. The Ford culture has changed since I worked in the Research Center. That change was coming down even as I was there. The mavericks who made Ford innovative and successful are gone. You meant to make it better, but you destroyed the uniqueness of the culture. Efficiency is not the true measure of success. Innovation is the yardstick you need to use. You have outsourced the things which made Ford unique; the creative parts. The culture that existed when I was there is gone. There is a different culture which is extremely repressive. Creativity and innovation have been vigorously repressed. Creative people cannot be molded. Freedom of action has been stifled. Freedom of action is at the very heart of creative behavior. You got rid of a great number of people, but you could not tell the difference between the dead wood and the innovators. For example, you got rid of an alcoholic who spent most of his time sleeping at his desk. That was good, but you also got rid of a couple of productive people who were splitting his workload. That is a small travesty. Multiply that by a couple of hundred and you have a huge travesty with many "why bother" repercussions. You drove your best people away. You have created a culture of automaton obedient mechanics. All you seem to have left are crank turning nine-to-fivers. Now, make a liar out of me by coming out with a real public pleasing product next year. I have watched you in your homespun TV commercials. From that, I have guessed that you have no new public pleasing product. You have nothing in the pipe to save the day. If you did, you would be talking about that instead of reminiscing about what you used to be. Quit telling us what you have done. No one cares about yesterday. Do something now! You don't sound homespun. You sound like an boring old man in a rocking chair belaboring his grandchildren with use-ta-bees. It seems you had all of your research investment in this one vehicle, the explorer. That was to single handedly carry Ford into the future. It is a great Explorer, but it is really just more of the same, more me too. To be sure, it is improved, but it is not that much different than the last one. The biggest problem is, you had all of your marbles in that one bag. You did not count on disaster. You had no contingency plan. You had no alternative. When Firestone, and the Nader look-alike thugs cut your legs off, you had nowhere to turn. Please notice that the problem was not Firestone or the thugs. Anyone could have cut your legs off, because you had all of your marbles in one bag. Any fly-by-night thug could have cut the bottom out of that bag and left you holding it, just as you are now. You had no escape route set up. You had nothing in the pipe. You had no next great product to bring up to attract attention and deflect the heat. You had no Taurus. You should have had. There is no excuse for not having that next magic product. That you do not is not management excellence. It is incompetence. It is ridiculous that it takes most of four years to develop a product. But, knowing your development is that inept, there is no excuse for not always having four real new products in the pipe. I'm not discussing reworks of old stuff, face lifts. I mean real new products. Something new should come out of that pipe every year at launch time. You have product teams, but they are not doing anything. They are a bunch of people assembled through politics, with no common thread. They are assigned rather than selected, and the brownest nose gets the plumpest task. They sit around and talk and create papers. When it is all said and done, they give you a face lift of an old product. Considering what these people are doing for you, they are grossly overpaid. You make the same products over and over again. You have been doing that since the launch of the Taurus. What you need to do is steal the march again, but you have nothing, that I saw, set up to do that. You need some hit squads, some real new product teams. You need to get out there and find some real dominants who can lead teams. You cannot create or appoint teams. Only a dominant can create a team. The teams must be assembled by someone who understands people, a true dominant. Those teams will need some license and freedom to work outside the system. Believe me, I have been there. If you are honestly trying to get something done, working within the system at Ford is like swimming in a pool filled with Jell-O. It should not take more than a year to take a new product
from concept to launch. You need real teams to do that. To get
real teams you need dominants with enough power and freedom of
action to create the teams. Ford used to have that environment.
You used to have that culture. You drove it away. Though it took
to long because of the bureaucracy, that culture created the
Taurus. It also created the Mustang and the original T-bird.
Let's do it again. Find the right people and give them the space
too be great.
|