Word: forde
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...Management in a Mess Detroit's corporate culture is obviously complicit in the industry's deterioration, just as it was guilty of creating an unparalleled manufacturing system decades earlier. The Detroit approach has been plan-command-control, stemming from that original control freak, Henry Ford. At GM, a management hierarchy that had been created by GM's master planner, Alfred P. Sloan, in the '20s - GM's first and most successful restructuring - was still functioning in the '80s. Management's job was to create the products, design the production system and provide solutions if there were problems. Everyone else followed...
...Ford's owners have always had a difficult relationship with the hired help. Henry Ford II fired everybody, says Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school - including Lee Iacocca. Jacques Nasser, named CEO in 1999 to reinvent Ford, bought Volvo and Land Rover to create a luxury portfolio; he saw Ford as more than an auto company and tried to overhaul the culture. He was ousted in 2001 by Bill Ford Jr. - great-grandson of Henry - who took back the wheel for a couple of years...
...What's Next The irony about being called on the carpet in Washington is that Detroit actually has a fairly clear idea of where it's going. Ford, for instance, under the leadership of Alan Mulally, has rationalized the company, dumping Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover and some of its stake in Mazda. Volvo may be next. "We have streamlined all of the brands to focus on Ford," he says. Ford wants to be able to create small- and medium-size cars around the world from a single global blueprint. The initial product of the One Ford strategy...
...their first day of testimony before Congress, the chief executives of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler were the picture of humility. Hats in hand, they pleaded for money. "We made mistakes, which we're learning from," GM's Rick Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee, outlining plans for change that Congress had requested as a precondition for receiving billions of dollars in much needed loans. Ford's Alan Mulally said his company has shifted "in a completely new direction." (See the 50 worst cars of all time...
...playing Russian roulette with the economy," as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd put it. But that didn't mean there was anything like a consensus on how to handle the urgent request for a total of $34 billion in bridge loans - $7 billion for Chrysler, $9 billion for Ford and $18 billion for GM. Democrats and Republicans clearly still have major disagreements about where the money should come from, how much Detroit should get up-front and what kind of conditions to impose for such government assistance...