Word: forde
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...lets the hired help do that, although that's probably not how CEO Jacques Nasser views himself. When the board appointed Bill, it promoted Jac (as he is known), considered to be the industry's top executive, and encouraged the two men to work out a power-sharing arrangement. Ford oversees the board and the long-term direction of the company; Nasser is the boss who makes the day-to-day decisions. Admits Ford: "My role here probably has no parallel anywhere...
...working-class Lebanese kid from Melbourne, Australia, have laid out an interesting blueprint for change and done some things that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. They have broken ranks with other U.S. automakers. Last summer, for instance, Nasser announced that fuel mileage for all Ford trucks would be increased 25%, or 5 m.p.g., by 2005 (it is now about 20.5), well ahead of the government mandate that the other big companies are following. And they have gone to great lengths to promote a corporate culture that, as Nasser says, "looks at itself every day through...
...last year's annual meeting, Ford unveiled the company's first annual "corporate citizenship" report. Replete with self-criticisms of the company's reliance on huge, emissions-belching SUVs, the 98-page report drew a bewildering avalanche of press--from environmentalists who saw it as a triumph, and from hardened SUV and truck lovers who saw it as the pinnacle of hypocrisy. Was Ford just going to stop making the ground pounders that account for more than 50% of its revenues...
...Ford's answer to that contradiction goes something like this: As long as customers want them, we will keep making SUVs, because if we don't, someone else will. We'll just keep making them cleaner and safer, and thus force every other auto company to do the same...
...understand that delicate and ambitious pursuit, you must enter the world of Bill and Jac--a relationship between two very different men half a generation apart. Simply speaking, Ford is the impassioned do-gooder, the green-tea-drinking fly-fisherman who has a hard time saying no to any worthy cause. Nasser is the corporate hardass who just as easily might have run the old, secretive Ford Motor and reveled in it. "When you look at how important openness has become for Ford [Motor], you have to remember that Bill has always been that way," says a longtime insider...