Word: iacocca
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Thus the most important selling job that Lee Iacocca did at Ford was to get the Mustang going. The project started quietly in January 1961 when Don Frey, a bright young engineer whom Iacocca had made his product planning manager, asked the advance styling department to draw up designs for a little sports car. When it produced a trim clay model of a little two-seater that looked like a rocket, Iacocca invited Grand Prix Driver Dan Gurney and other racing buffs in to give their opinions. Recalls Iacocca: "All the buffs said, 'What...
...Mustang," Lee Iacocca said at this week's premiere on the World's Fair grounds in New York, "Ford has actually created three cars in one." Aside from the basic $2,368 model (which is not so basic; it comes with bucket seats, padded dash, and leatherlike vinyl upholstery), anyone who wants to turn his Mustang into a little Thunderbird can load it with just about every luxury option Detroit has, from automatic transmission to a big V-8 to air conditioning. Finally, the sports-car purist who wants performance and more horsepower can spend...
...auto executives still rely principally on their own intuition, using market research only to back it up-as Iacocca finally did in the case of the Mustang. "There are a lot of markets out there," says Iacocca, sweeping his hand at the panorama of flat Michigan countryside that he can see through the glass wall of his fifth-floor office. "My most important role here is to tell my top management how I view these markets, and how we want to respond to them. When I am finally convinced that there is a market for a new kind...
...Boss. The twelfth floor is where Henry Ford, Ford President Arjay Miller and Executive Vice President Charles Patterson have their offices in a modernistic glass headquarters about a mile from Iacocca's building. Generally, Henry Ford watches over long-range planning and personnel development, Miller is in charge of finances, marketing and central staff, and Patterson of manufacturing. Unlike many of the sons of the pioneers of the auto industry, Ford maintains a constant interest in the business, letting his appointees run the company on a day-to-day basis but interceding whenever he deems it necessary. "Make...
...Henry Ford wants you to be blunt," says Iacocca, "and I happen to be blunt. We don't try to Alphonse and Gaston each, other, and we don't try to beat around the bush." Iacocca marshals his arguments so well and pushes his ideas so hard that Ford once stopped him just as he was winding up to make a speech and said: "All right, Lee, now let's get the facts, or you'll sell us without our knowing them...