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Ford's Fields, 022:
By Willie Gaffer:
January 9, 2006:
It seems Ford has a new bigshot. His name is Mark Fields. According to a piece by Bryce Hoffman in the Christmas issue of the Detroit News - Free Press, this is the guy who is going to save Ford Motor Company. He is to be the new CEO replacing William Clay Ford. He has a big plate full. Ford lost over 2 billion bucks last year. Fields will be the hatchet man and leader rolled into one. Part of his plan seems to be a restructuring. In English that means firing a lot of people and closing some plants. We can hope he will fire the right people while retaining the keepers. If he does, it will be a first for Ford.
All the time I was there they fired a lot of people too, but it was always the wrong ones. They had no one there who could tell the difference between a productive person and deadwood. If Fields depends on the line managers to make those decisions, it will go as usual. The suck ups will stay and the real workers will be dumped. The "team players" will stay on and the creative people will get the boot. It has always been thus. We will see what Fields manages.
This guy does have impressive credentials. His first accomplishment was to turn Ford of Argentina around. One feather in the hat. His next one was even bigger. He went to Japan and turned Mazda around. Mazda is Ford's foothold in the Japanese business world. Ford owns enough of Mazda to have control. If you know anything about the Japanese cultural mentality, this turnaround was a big deal. In Japan, age is venerated for it's own sake and getting the old geezers who ran the firm out was no easy task. He did it and got a really big feather in his hat. After that he mucked around in Ford of Europe for a while. He did some good there, but never finished because William Clay began coming to his senses.
Ford realized that the turn around he had hoped for in America was not going to happen under his clumsy hand. Ford had been steadily losing ground since he fired Jack Nasser way back when. The story abut Nasser was that he had taken his eye off of the core business and Ford had faltered. The truth is, he never had his eye on the business. Worse than that, however, was that William Clay Ford, who put Nasser in power in the first place took his eye off of Nasser. By the time he fired Nasser it was already too late. The downhill slide had begun.
Under Nasser, some really bad things happened and they continued under Ford. What happened was the vicious suppression of the creative people who had made Ford the strong company it was. The motto became, let's be team players. In any language this means keep your mouth shut and do as you are told. Don't draw attention to yourself and thus to your manager. Under that repressive atmosphere, the really good people got out if they could and hunkered down if they could not. It became about self defense instead of contributing. Creativity went out the window and the suck ups took over. They had a field day creating bureaucratic labyrinths and games within games. This crap was just beginning when I retired. I'm sure it is continuing as I write this.
That is where Ford is now and that is what Fields has to face and deal with. He can fire all of the people he wants and close plants too. That alone will not turn Ford around. He needs more than efficiency. He needs new products. He needs vehicles that are distinctive and obviously better than his competitors. The day when Ford could get by with a face lift or a kludge to impress the unwary are past. It's not GM he has to beat, it's Honda and Toyota. Like everyone else, their cars look just like the Taurus. The difference is their's are better built. Fields will not overcome that with a better built Taurus. It's too late for that.
What Fields must have is innovation, real new products. He is not going to get that from the suck ups and team players that have taken over Ford in Dearborn. He will have to find and draw out the creative people who are still there and in hiding. It won't be easy. If he thinks the bureaucracy of Japan was tough, he will find it even tougher in Dearborn. In Dearborn it will not be overt. It will be slippery and evasive. There will be no easy handle. People will pretend to pitch in, but they will somehow managed to not get it right. Fields will find it necessary to fire people without apparent cause. It may look bad, but it must be done. Most of these will be highly paid nonproductive bigshots who are entrenched in the system. These people would rather destroy Ford than lose their power.
If Fields can manage to root them out and get good mid level executives in place, he will have a chance. Then he can go after his creative people and appeal to them. It will be very difficult. These people at Ford who are hunkered down will have fresh in their minds the memories of the mean punishments that were meted out to non "team players." They will not be draw out easily. They will not trust Fields or anyone else for a very long time. Some of these punishments are very subtle, but very effective. They have the effect of crushing moral.
On technique is very similar to the shunning made infamous by the Amish. It happened to me when I was there. I know what it is like to see incompetents treated with warmth and friendliness while my real achievements went deliberately unnoticed and unrewarded. That can be very demoralizing after a while. I watched it being done to a number of people when I was there. What was just as bad was the reward system. There were simply no incentives for good people to perform better than poor people. The rewards were unrelated to achievement. From what I hear, that is still the case.
The good part of all this is at least William Clay Ford has
faced the reality of his bungling. He has found his folksy babbling
on television is having no positive effect. He has realized talking
about products is not the same as having those products. Perhaps
he has finally understood that it is not easy to con consumers
when they have other options. So let us hope he will not interfere
with Fields. Let us hope that Fields really has the wherewithal
to turn Ford around. I hope sincerely for that. My pension and
health insurance depend on it.
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