Word: iacocca
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...realized that sales, not engineering, was his truest calling. Very well, they said to the upstart, you can sell: trucks, in Chester, Pa. Undaunted, he sold and sold and sold. During the next nine years, he hustled up the regional sales ranks. Finally, weeks after his marriage in 1956, Iacocca got called back to headquarters as a marketing manager under the chief "whiz kid," Ford Vice President Robert McNamara. Iacocca officially indulged his ^ love of the punchy phrase. Earlier that year he had devised a $56-a-month credit plan for Ford buyers ("$56 for '56"); later he was intent...
...April 1964, Ford introduced the Mustang. It is difficult to overstate the attendant hoopla. The car and its principal corporate patron, Lee Iacocca, appeared on the cover of both TIME and Newsweek. Iacocca, TIME declared, "is the hottest young man in Detroit," brilliant, an "ingenious automotive merchandising expert." Twenty-one years later, a metal sculpture of a Mustang hangs over Iacocca's desk at Chrysler, and a 1964 Mustang convertible, a gift from his wife in 1981, sits in his garage in suburban Detroit. "I'm generally seen as the father of the Mustang," he says in his book...
...Iacocca's salesmanship--his hucksterism, even--accounted for much of his personal success in the mid-'60s, when carmakers were discovering the youth market. For snazziness and corporate profligacy, Detroit has not equaled itself since. The introduction of a sporty new sedan, orchestrated by Iacocca, typified the wonderful wantonness. In 1966 he sailed dozens of Lincoln-Mercury dealers to the Virgin Islands, where after a meal on a beach at sunset, an amphibious landing craft thrashed ashore. Out onto the sand popped a brand-new white Cougar driven by Singer Vic Damone, who proceeded to croon...
...Iacocca became Ford's president in 1970. Eight years later, Chairman Henry Ford II demoted and exiled him. "He'll always be mad at Henry Ford," says Kathi Iacocca, 25, one of his two daughters. "He will take it to his grave. People who don't understand his anger don't know my father." Says a former Iacocca colleague: "He believes in reprisals for his enemies." In the book, Henry Ford is depicted as venal and mean, an almost unbelievably unappealing character. Iacocca asserts that his former boss was paranoid, vulgar, personally extravagant at company expense, cruel and sexist. Many...
Even the author, now that he has disgorged all the animus, entertains second thoughts. "Maybe I shouldn't have written a couple of those things," Iacocca concedes. Yet another time, he could not contain his old angers as he defended his view that people are divided into two camps--"nice guys" and jerks (his own term is far earthier). "I know, I know," he said to the suggestion that life is not that simple. "But if a guy is over 25% jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95%." Finally, many Ford executives bristle at Iacocca's implication...