This article is a very interesting read about how Mulally is changing Ford's culture. It's amazing that Ford ever got any products to market with the old culture. Here's a quote from the article:

 

Nice find.

 

The 100 billion $ question is why didn't something like this happen @ Ford 5 or even 10 years ago?

 

For 2 reasons:

1) There wasn't the dire need to change 5-10 years ago that there is now

and

2) There wasn't someone with the will to tear down the old school bureaucracy.

 

1) There was the need for this sort of change 5 - 10 years ago. One could argue even 20 or 30 years ago. The problem was that Ford was still turning enough of a profit that the need for change wasn't recognized. But certainly the need for this sort of change was recognized 5 years ago which was the reason to Bill Ford fired Nassar and took over. It appears that Bill Ford didn't have the ***** to make the needed changes.

2) That's the real reason. In one of the other Mulally articles (I think WSJ) they mentioned a usless top executive that Mulally pushed into retirement. It sounded like this guy should have been fired 10 years ago, but he kept is job and his empire because he was Bill Ford's fishing buddy.

 

Exactly. That's why I said there wasn't a dire need at that time. They were still making a good profit. Even 5 years ago it hadn't reached the critical stage it's at now (at least in the minds of Ford's upper management AKA Bill Ford and his cronies).

Well, at least Bill Ford had the ***** to hire Mulally and empower him to make the changes.

 

From the sounds of it, he's doing the right things...
Hopefully the results will say the same thing.

Good going Alan
Take this b***h to the next level

 

It's more than one guy. Bill Ford had the desire to enact change but wasn't a strong enough or experienced enough leader to actaully get it done. Be let the 'crats stonewall him into Ford's current state. The conservative "don't change anything, don't take risks" personalities dominated all aspects of Ford for years. They're a big reason the Freestyle and 500 look like nothing, and why there's still multiple Ford Companys worldwide instead of one united FMC.

 

I don't think V10 way saying it was "only one guy" that was the problem. He was just citing an example of Mulally cleaning out the dead wood.

 

Thank you, that's what I was saying.

 

I'll tell you another thing Mulally needs to do, Eliminate the Ford executive garage.

Ford execs are given Ford vehicles to drive and they are maintained by Ford's executive garage. The garage cleans, services, repairs the vehicles and fills the gas tanks. Ford execs are completely shielded from the hassles of trying to deal for FLM dealers for both purchase and repair.

ALL Ford execs. must be required, every year, to go purchase a new FoMoCo vehicle from a randomly selected dealer without any Ford purchase plan A-Z and without any identification that they are a Ford employee. The execs must then take their vehicles to different FLM dealers and get their Ford vehicles serviced again incognito.

If Mulally did this I guarantee you that within 1 year Ford's dealer network would be straightened out big time.

 

if they're "forced" to do that, the biggest change would probably be a lot of said executives leaving the company if they had to deal with the crap most everyone else seems to get at the dealership! Nice idea, but don't see that happening anytime soon. Now if they instituted a "secret shopper"-type program as a means for quality control, that would be good - but then there is the question of funding.

 

That would be absolutely fantastic, and should be a no brainier.

 

That kind of stuff happens in a lot of really large organizations. The bigger a company or organization gets, the more international or regional divisions a company gets, the worse it becomes. I've seen it a certain large older global software/hardware/services company I was with for quite a few years, I've seen it in government as well.

 

Well, I work for one of the worlds largest corporations and we have alot of "across the fence" cooperation between business units. In fact, a sizable portion of the work that my group does isn't for the division we're in. I guess since I don't see that type of thing in my employer, I found it shocking to see it in Ford.