American Icon (34 page)

B
ill Ford once complained that his company had more political intrigue than czarist Russia. Now Mulally had stormed the Winter Palace and was ushering in change at a dizzying pace. He had made Derrick Kuzak his commissar of product development and ordered him to liberate Ford’s designers and engineers from bean counters and bureaucratic inefficiency. Major overhauls of manufacturing and marketing were being planned, and the search was on for new talent to lead them. Whole layers of corporate bureaucracy were being purged. But Mulally’s revolution had been relatively bloodless. Steve Hamp and Mark Schulz were gone, but those waiting for more heads to roll—and that included just about everyone following Ford—would be disappointed.

As 2006 came to an end, the rest of Ford’s executives were quietly taking their places on Mulally’s team. Those first few months had been tough. These were people who had risen through the company’s ranks by mastering a game that was now fundamentally changed, and they were still struggling to learn the new rules. The smiling Kansan whom many executives had dismissed as a sappy rube had proven to be a regular radical, hurling bombs into their fortified bunkers and Molotov cocktails at some of Ford’s most cherished delusions. But Mulally had also proven himself to be an able and inspiring leader who, in a matter of months, had come up with a comprehensive plan to save Ford Motor Company from itself. Those who thought they could wait him out were gone. Those who were left joined Mulally’s team and pledged allegiance to his plan—sometimes gritting their teeth and cursing under their breath, but doing it all the same.

“I don’t care if everyone believes in the plan one hundred percent, as long as they act like they do,” Mulally told them. “Because once you start acting like you do, you’ll find yourself in the light—and you won’t want to go back into the darkness.”

He was right. Though the bickering and backstabbing would begin again every time he left the office, Ford’s executives were starting to realize that these were no longer viable means of career advancement. At the same time, adherence to Mulally’s strict processes was starting to yield tangible results. Mulally’s cause was helped by the deepening
crisis afflicting the rest of the domestic automobile industry. With each passing month, there were fewer and fewer places to go.

But Mulally was taking no chances. Now that he had his team in place, he did not want to risk losing any of his top talent. With the board’s approval, he ordered Laymon to put together retention plans for each of Ford’s key executives—just in case. Mulally still had concerns about several of them, but he wanted to see if they could be rehabilitated. He knew that Ford did not have any executive talent to spare.

By late December, the old turf wars were finally winding down.

“If I have a technical problem, Lewis will say, ‘Hey, I’ll send a few guys over from Volvo to help you,’ ” Mark Fields explained at the time. “You don’t hear [Mulally] say the word ‘I’ a lot. It’s ‘we.’ It’s the team.”

The cult of personality that had long held sway at Ford was being replaced by a new regime of results. But some privately expressed concern that too much was riding on Mulally’s shoulders and wondered if his would be a permanent revolution or just another failed coup.

The Best and Worst of Times

O
n January 7, 2007, guitars shrieked, spotlights danced, and a hundred camera flashes popped as Alan Mulally rode onto the stage in Detroit’s Cobo Arena in a new Ford Five Hundred, an enormous Blue Oval glowing on the screen behind him. He emerged to the cheers of Ford Motor Company employees who laced the capacity crowd of automotive journalists from around the world. This was Mulally’s first auto show, and nothing in the aerospace industry had prepared him for it. He had done plenty of air shows, but those were subdued affairs compared to the North American International Auto Show, an annual spectacle of enormous proportions in which the world’s automobile manufacturers struggled to outdo one another before the assembled automotive press.

At the first auto show in 1907, Henry Ford had revealed his plans for the Model T—the car that would turn his modest Michigan start-up into one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world. Now, exactly one hundred years later, the star of Ford’s show would not be a car, but a computer. Dubbed “Sync,” it was the product of a collaboration between the Dearborn automaker and Microsoft Corporation. It allowed motorists to connect their cellular telephones or MP3 music players to their automobile—either with a USB cable or a wireless Bluetooth connection—and control them using voice commands. Drivers could make calls, answer their phones, read text messages, or choose songs without taking their hands off the wheel.
^*
It was nothing
short of revolutionary, and it drew more attention than most of the cars and trucks shown in Detroit that year.

And it almost did not happen. A month before Sync’s scheduled unveiling, working prototypes had not yet arrived in Dearborn. But when Bill Gates is personally overseeing a project, things have a way of working out.

Sync was the common solution to both companies’ problems. Ford wanted its own in-car infotainment system to challenge General Motors’ OnStar system, a subscription-based service that used live operators instead of computers. Microsoft wanted to establish a beachhead inside the automobile—that elusive space between work and home where millions of people somehow managed to survive without its products. In 2003, the software giant set out to change that, beginning work on a voice-activated system that would allow motorists to control their phones and iPods while driving. It also began looking for partners in each of the world’s major automobile markets to put it on the road. Microsoft inked its first deal with Italy’s Fiat SpA in 2005.
^*
In the United States, Microsoft initially approached General Motors, for the simple reason that it was the biggest player. But GM already had OnStar and was not interested in swapping it for an untried alternative from a company that was not exactly known for its flawless launches. Ford was next on Microsoft’s list. The two companies had been working together since the Nasser era. Though the plug had been pulled on some of those early ventures, the two companies still had a good relationship thanks to the mutual admiration of their respective chairmen. Bill Ford was impressed by Gates’ inventiveness; Gates appreciated Bill Ford’s “
vision for how technology can improve the car experience.” That was about as much praise as he could muster for any other business leader. But despite their affinity, Gates said nothing to Ford about Microsoft’s new system until GM passed on it.
Then, in April 2005, the Microsoft chairman traveled to Dearborn to present a $1 million donation to the Henry Ford Museum. Bill Ford was there, too. After the ceremony, Gates told him that he had an idea for the perfect collaboration. Later that summer, Ford and Microsoft began getting in sync.
^*

Ford originally planned to introduce the new system in the Explorer. But when Mark Fields was briefed on the program after taking over the Americas group a few months later, he rejected that idea. Fields recognized that Sync offered Ford something it desperately needed—a way to connect with young car buyers. To do that, Ford had to put it in a car they would actually buy. There was only one such car in Ford’s entire North American lineup: the Focus. Sync in a cheap compact was cool. Sync in a big SUV was just another piece of technology to bedevil their parents. Fields made the switch. Sync would debut in the Focus that fall, then spread rapidly to the rest of Ford’s showroom.

The only problem with the change in plans was that it made more work for the engineers, who were already struggling to deliver the product on time. Ford’s system was originally supposed to use the same hardware as Fiat’s. But as the designers added more features and voice commands, it became clear that the processors were just not powerful enough—particularly since Ford wanted a system that could be expanded in the future. In May 2006, both Ford and Microsoft decided a more robust set of chips was needed. The first Sync prototypes arrived in Dearborn on December 21. They were not fully functional, but they were close enough to fool reporters.

A
lan Mulally was not fully up and running either. The usually eloquent CEO stumbled through the first half of Ford’s press conference at the auto show with an uncharacteristically stilted delivery. Mulally hated prepared speeches, but his handlers insisted that he
use a teleprompter for this important event. It was a bad idea. But just when it seemed like the jaundiced journalists might start yawning, an image flashed up on the giant screen behind Mulally that drew audible gasps from some in the arena. There was Bill Gates smiling down on his old friend from Seattle like a nerdy Wizard of Oz. The Microsoft chairman was broadcasting via a satellite uplink from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Sync was being unveiled simultaneously for the world’s technology press. Sync would prove the biggest hit of both shows—a lucky break for Ford, since the automaker had nothing else to offer in Detroit other than some mid-cycle product freshenings and a few concepts that would never be built.
^*

Ford’s other big hit was Mulally himself. Though his performance on stage was underwhelming, he was still Detroit’s most interesting new model. As soon as Ford’s formal press conference was finished, scores of reporters scrambled onto the stage, swarming the wide-eyed CEO like a bunch of Africanized honeybees. The scrum was so intense that more than one journalist was knocked off the stage as reporters from five continents thrust their tape recorders and boom mikes at the beaming executive.

“I have a great team here at Ford,” he told them. “The fact that we were able to raise the money to finance the plan just shows you the confidence the people have in us, [and] you’re going to see that momentum building quarter after quarter.”

When he finally broke away from press conference and began walking the show floor to check out the competition, the rock star treatment continued. Mulally’s media handlers held the reporters at bay, but photographers followed him everywhere he went—even into the General Motors and Chrysler stands. When he surprised the
leaders of both companies by showing up unannounced, they looked less than thrilled to see him. The puckish Mulally just grinned, relishing their discomfort. GM’s Rick Wagoner and Chrysler’s Tom LaSorda and the other Detroit auto brass resented the speed with which the industry outsider had become the darling of the automotive press. In their minds, they had been slogging it out in the trenches for years and getting little credit for it. Now the aerospace industry’s answer to Howdy Doody had flown into town with a four-point plan and some color-coded slides and quite literally stolen the show. His Cheshire-cat grin was plastered across the front page of every newspaper and on the cover of every magazine. Nor were Ford’s competitors the only ones gnashing their teeth. Mark Fields had been the public face of the company in the United States ever since he arrived back in Dearborn. Now he stood awkwardly off to the side as reporters swirled around his new boss.