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...late. Having grabbed the wheel, Ford the rich kid is driving Ford Motor down a radical path. A fiercely principled environmentalist and congenial company man, Ford is fomenting a revolution to transform the family firm--now a worldwide industrial monster with $170 billion in annual sales--into a corporation that cares as much for consumers and the air they breathe as it does for its bottom line. And he's doing it at a time when Ford Motor's image is suffering from allegations that its Explorer models had design flaws that contributed to the failure of their Firestone tires...
Ford believes that by reconfiguring Ford Motor, he has a shot at rearranging the entire 21st century industrial landscape. "We have the ability to transform a great old-line company into a vital, global model of sustainable manufacturing," he said recently in his office, gazing over the sprawling River Rouge factory complex that his great-grandfather Henry established in 1917. "But we're on a continuum, and I don't know if we ever declare victory...
...sense, what Ford proposes is Ford Motor's second revolution. Some of his ideals are eerily similar to those of his great-grandfather, an environmentalist and pre-eminent bird watcher who pioneered the assembly line, the service station and, above all, the then heretical notion of a working wage. (And yes, the founder was also an anti-Semite and a union-busting tyrant who spied on his workers.) Henry Ford reinvented manufacturing and changed the world. Bill Ford wants to go Henry one better by embracing the notion of sustainability, or the idea that you can make things without damaging...
...Bill family values," as they are called derisively by his detractors, don't absolve the company of decades of enthusiastic polluting, during which Ford Motor's top executives fought environmental regulators every step of the way. And Ford has been called a hypocrite for having benefited from this corporate behavior...
...very different men half a generation apart. Simply speaking, Ford is the impassioned do-gooder, the green-tea-drinking fly-fisherman who has a hard time saying no to any worthy cause. Nasser is the corporate hardass who just as easily might have run the old, secretive Ford Motor and reveled in it. "When you look at how important openness has become for Ford [Motor], you have to remember that Bill has always been that way," says a longtime insider. "Jac supports it because he realizes it's good business...