Word: motors
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...sense of how plodding Ford Motor can be, talk to Vance Zanardelli, whose windowless office is tucked away in the Research and Innovation Center. Zanardelli, who is working on cutting-edge hydrogen research, has experienced firsthand Ford's roadblocks--and how the new leadership is trying to remove them. When his team unveiled the prototype it had developed for a hydrogen-powered internal-combustion car to top Ford executives in 2001, "Bill just loved it," Zanardelli says. "Everyone else raised all the reasons it wouldn't work." Despite the boss's enthusiasm, Zanardelli ran into budgetary problems and decided...
...success. Until recently, with the exception of a new Mustang, an instant hit, Ford has failed to produce cars that have energized the market. Peter Horbury, the company's director of design and Volvo's former design chief, whom Ford brought to Detroit in 2004, was stunned by Ford Motor's rulebound ways. "I told the designers to just get on with what they were doing," he says, "and they looked at me terrified, like, What does that mean?" The designers were so used to following orders that Horbury needed first to develop with them a basic company design language...
...turn the ship around," says Fields. "But he expects us to deliver--and told us that." Anne Stevens, who heads manufacturing in North America, is a tough-talking engineer from New Jersey ("You got a problem with that?" she says with a laugh) whose style contrasts notably with Ford Motor's mild-mannered Midwestern culture. Fields and Stevens, often referred to as Mark and Anne in the same breath, are the people Bill will rely on to steer the turnaround...
Bill Ford was never particularly comfortable with his country-club world, anyway. His father William Clay Ford, brother of longtime chairman Henry II, chaired Ford Motor's finance committee and bought the Detroit Lions. His mother Martha Parke Firestone (yes, that Firestone) was already an auto blueblood. Although educated at the élite institutions of Hotchkiss and Princeton, Bill was especially interested in labor and what working people do. His passions tended toward sports, American history and the environment. His parents hoped he would not grow up a snob, and his mother drove him across town to play hockey...
...Ford Motor's efforts to cut costs, go green and produce more exciting cars can already be found in some of its 2007 models. But by one measure, Ford is still heading in the wrong direction. Last week Moody's downgraded Ford's debt to a lower "junk" rating, saying it's unlikely the company will be willing to stop the slide in market share. Still, says childhood friend Mark Higbie: "Bill has picked his horse, and he's going to ride it until it crosses the finish line...