Word: forde
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...notion of the sustainable corporation is getting traction in the most unlikely places. Just three years ago, companies like Ford were members of the Global Climate Coalition, a U.S. business lobby that claimed the global-warming threat (and the Kyoto accord) was nonsense. On the heels of BPAmoco, Ford abandoned the coalition in 1999, and so have the likes of General Motors and DaimlerChrysler. Once renowned polluters like chemical giants Dupont and Dow are spending heavily on "green" solutions to business...
...sense, what Ford proposes is Ford Motor's second revolution. Some of his ideals are eerily similar to those of his great-grandfather, an environmentalist and pre-eminent bird watcher who pioneered the assembly line, the service station and, above all, the then heretical notion of a working wage. (And yes, the founder was also an anti-Semite and a union-busting tyrant who spied on his workers.) Henry Ford reinvented manufacturing and changed the world. Bill Ford wants to go Henry one better by embracing the notion of sustainability, or the idea that you can make things without damaging...
...Bill family values," as they are called derisively by his detractors, don't absolve the company of decades of enthusiastic polluting, during which Ford Motor's top executives fought environmental regulators every step of the way. And Ford has been called a hypocrite for having benefited from this corporate behavior...
...Ford is well aware that there is precious little hard evidence to date that being green brings in greenbacks. And sustainability will absolutely require profitability. "Can we do this and make money? We have to," challenges Ford. "Has it ever been done? No. But it hasn't been tried either...
...Ford has two valuable assets in his quest to change history. One is that his name is on the door: his family supports him, and they still own 40% of the company's Class B voting stock. Last year the family got $150.5 million in dividends--a number that stays constant no matter where the share price is. No cranky cousins or siblings are going to fire Bill...