Word: forded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although lacocca's company is only one-sixth the size of GM in terms of revenue and less than a third as big as Ford, that kind of talk has made him easily the auto industry's best-known figure. A Gallup poll of heads of small-and medium-size businesses earlier this year found lacocca the U.S. business executive they respected most. He got 27 times the number of votes of the runner-up, Frank Gary, who retired last month as chairman of International Business Machines Corp...
...smaller, slimmer Chrysler can make a profit selling only 1 .2 null vehicles instead of the 2.3 million required in 1980, a big advantage in tough economic times. But this transmogrification is not without huge risks. The company can no longer compete across the board with GM and Ford by building car models in every size and price category. It remains burdened by $2 billion in long-term debt. If it should falter ever so slightly, it could again be plunged into a financial abyss. Says GM Chairman Roger Smith: "The jury is still out on Chrysler. It all depends...
...international competition that challenges the U.S. auto industry today was unknown when lacocca began his career. His father Nicola immigrated to the U.S. from southern Italy in 1902 and eventually built a small auto-rental business in Allentown, Pa., with 33 cars, mostly Fords. Surrounded by Model A's, Son Lido always wanted to work for Ford. After graduating from Lehigh and getting a master's in engineering at Princeton, he joined the company as an engineer in 1946, then quickly switched to a district sales job. By 1970, he had risen so far that only Henry Ford H, grandson...
lacocca succeeded by indulging the passionate American love affair with the automobile. He combined a knowledge of an automobile's innards with a shrewd, almost intuitive sense of what car buyers wanted. He stripped the plain-Jane body off Ford's dowdy Falcon and replaced it with a long-hood, short-rear-deck configuration called the Mustang that in 1964 set a record for automobile sales by a first-year model (418,000). Four years later he reached into Ford's spare-parts bin again and launched the limousine-like Continental Mark III on a Thunderbird chassis...
...solve Chrysler's problems. When lacocca arrived, he found management in disarray. Executive responsibilities were ill defined, and there were few of the sophisticated financial tools needed to keep track of operations. The quickest fix lacocca knew was to hire people who understood the same system he did: other Ford executives. Some were called out of retirement, others were wooed away and enlisted with lacocca for the challenge of engineering a turnaround. Today the four top officers are Ford alumni: lacocca; Vice Chairman Gerald Greenwald; Harold Sperlich, president of North American automotive operations; and Executive Vice President of Finance Robert...