Word: lacocca
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...Detroit, where the man in charge was briefly known as "Ayatullah" lacocca, there are dozens of eerily silent rooms with long rows of empty desks at company headquarters...
...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...
...lacocca personified Detroit
...restrictions. He told anyone who would listen that Chrysler's future was threatened unless it could get financial help to transform its aging, oversize fleet into economical front- wheel-drive cars. It took losses of $1 billion, plus all of lacocca's lobbying during his first year at Chrysler, to ram the mes sage through...