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By 2005, Ford’s North American factories were running at only 79 percent of capacity. The company was actually losing an average of $590 on every vehicle it produced in the region, while Toyota and Honda Motor Company both earned more than $1,200. A big part of the problem was productivity. Fewer than thirty hours of labor went into assembling the average Toyota in North America, while it
took nearly thirty-six hours to put together the typical Ford. Yet instead of getting rid of factories, Ford was actually adding more. Five years after Nasser spun off Visteon, Ford’s former parts subsidiary was on the verge of collapse and threatening to take the automaker down with
it. Ford relied heavily on parts from Visteon, and Visteon’s U.S. plants were still staffed by Ford workers because the UAW had refused to allow the company to break its contract with them. If Visteon failed, Ford would have to take them all back. It also would be left without a supplier for critical components. To avoid both these nightmares, CFO Don Leclair orchestrated a multibillion-dollar bailout of Visteon in May 2005 that kept both companies limping along. The deal required Ford to take back twenty-four Visteon factories in the United States and Mexico, but it was better than letting them be liquidated.
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The relief that permeated the company in the days following Nasser’s ouster was gone, replaced by the sober realization that Ford’s problems were bigger than one man. For most employees, the sense of hope sparked by Bill Ford’s decision to assume command gave way to a weary fatalism. They updated their résumés and waited for the next round of layoffs. A few continued to rail against the mistakes they saw taking place all around them, but Ford seemed impervious to change. More than one of these frustrated reformers took their case to the press, hoping that exposing Ford’s flaws would shame senior management into fixing them. The company leaked like a sieve as sensitive documents were smuggled out as proof. Most of these ended up at the
Detroit News
. Bill Ford’s security force tried to plug the leaks by installing software on the company’s e-mail network that flagged any message sent to the newspaper. Suspecting that senior executives were the source of some of these leaks, the corporate spooks monitored their cellphone calls and even installed cameras in rooms housing top-secret documents to see who accessed them and when.

Bill Ford knew his company had reached a critical point in its history. If it could not address its fundamental problems, it would not survive. He had tried to find someone to help him lead a global restructuring, but all of his overtures had been rebuffed and none of his
own executives was up to the challenge. Ford decided to narrow his focus and concentrate on fixing the North American automobile business because, if that continued to decline, nothing else would matter anyway. Everything else could wait.

“Our commitment must begin here in the United States,” Ford declared in that September speech. “While we’re a global company, our greatest challenges and the need for dramatic change are right here—North America.”

A
s Ford delivered that speech, he was in the process of putting together a team to take on that task. Instead of relying on his top executives, he gathered together less senior managers from around the world who had demonstrated real potential. To lead them, he turned to the company’s brightest rising star, Mark Fields.

Fields was a handsome young executive with a wavy mullet and movie-star smile who exuded self-confidence. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, and still had a bit of its air about him that a Rutgers economics degree and a Harvard MBA could not entirely dispel. Hired by Ford in 1989 after a stint at IBM, he started out in marketing and rose rapidly through the ranks thanks to a quick mind and an evident mastery of management science. Many who encountered Fields thought he was arrogant, but his belief in his own abilities was well founded. After extricating Ford’s Argentine subsidiary from a failed marriage with Volkswagen, he was transferred to Japan in 1999 and put in charge of Mazda. He was only thirty-eight, the
youngest person ever to lead a Japanese car company.

While Ghosn was making headlines as the savior of Nissan, Fields was working the same magic in Hiroshima, albeit without the media attention. Mazda had no clear idea of what it wanted to be. It had gotten into trouble by trying to match the bigger Japanese automakers with a full family of plain-vanilla models for the masses. But the world did not need another boring four-door sedan. Fields convinced the company to return to its roots and make sporty cars with edgy designs for people who were passionate about driving. The results were a new generation of vehicles that were widely regarded as some of the best
in the world and a new tagline, “Zoom-Zoom,” that was one of the catchiest in the industry. Mazda stood for something again, and it was soon back in the black. It was a stunning performance, and the lack of notice would have been far less chafing if another gaijin had not been making girls swoon in the streets of Tokyo. It would take Fields a long time to get over that. He was soon reassigned to London, where he was put in charge of Nasser’s Premier Automotive Group. In 2004, he became head of Ford of Europe, too.

In each of these postings, Fields made the brands stronger and the budgets leaner. After he arrived in Argentina, he was invited to the company’s annual polo tournament. He spent a pleasant afternoon sipping champagne with the Buenos Aires elite, then told his new employees that he hoped they had enjoyed the event, because it was the last one. At Mazda, he had
axed 20 percent of the company’s workforce—this in a nation where lifetime employment was still the norm. When he took over the Premier Automotive Group, he closed its posh headquarters on London’s tony Berkeley Square and moved himself and the rest of the employees to a Ford design facility in Soho.

Bill Ford and the other directors had been following Fields’ career closely. They thought his tough-love approach was just the sort of thing the company needed in North America. However, while he was being groomed for the post of president of the Americas—maybe even CEO one day—they were not sure he was ready to take on the company’s most dysfunctional division. But they were certain no one else was. So, in late August, Ford picked up his telephone and called Fields in London.

“I really need you here to run the Americas,” he said. “This place needs leadership, and you’re the guy I’d like to lead it. I need you to help me sort things out.”

Fields realized it was a huge opportunity, but he was not sure he wanted to take it. He knew how poisonous the culture inside World Headquarters could be, and he had a pretty good idea just how dire the situation in Dearborn had become. He asked to sleep on it. That night, Fields mulled his situation over a bottle of beer. He was not surprised that Ford was looking for someone else to run the region. Over the past six months, it had become obvious that North America
was a rudderless ship with no real plan for the future. He knew the infighting at the top of the house was occupying more time than the problems on the ground. Fields had been insulated from most of this because he was overseas, and he did not relish the idea of being thrown into the thick of it. He thought he could fix North America, but he was not sure the other executives would let him. The next day, he called Ford back and said he was ready to accept the job, provided his boss would promise to protect him.

“Let me build my team, and just keep corporate out of my hair,” he told Ford. “Everybody’s got to know who’s accountable for delivering the Americas, and that’s got to be me and my team—not everybody else sticking their fingers into the pot. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen what it’s done. There’s no plan there. There’s no accountability.”

“Fine,” Ford said. “You’ve got my approval.”

He gave Fields a month to wrap things up in Europe and told him to be in Dearborn by October. Then Ford sold Hertz to help finance the big changes he hoped were coming. Ford had acquired the car rental agency back in 1994. The automaker sold it for $5.6 billion, though the deal was actually worth closer to $15 billion once Hertz’s debt was factored into the equation.

Fields knew a lot about building brands, but less about building cars. To compensate, Ford paired him with Anne Stevens, a tough-talking manufacturing expert with red hair and an imposing stare. She was lifelong gearhead, an engineer by training who
dressed as a boy to sneak into the pits at the local racetrack when she was thirteen. As a married mother of two, Stevens had to fight for every rung of the corporate ladder. She came to Ford from Exxon in 1990 and became the automaker’s first female plant manager in Europe in 1995 and its first female vice president of vehicle operations in 2001. With her promotion to chief operating officer of the Americas group, she became one of the most powerful women in the automotive industry.

At fifty-six, she was more than ten years older than Fields and made no secret of the fact that she wanted his job. The two clashed from the start. At an early off-site briefing for senior managers, Stevens made a passionate plea to stop the backsliding on quality.

“We’re
never
going to get our customers back if we can’t improve
quality,” she said. “It’s the only way we can change the way people look at Ford.”

When she finished listing all the ways Ford was failing on this front, Fields raised his hand with a smirk.

“My name is Mark Fields and I have a quality problem,” he chuckled.

Stevens glared at him. This was serious stuff, and she thought he was belittling it—and her. But the two managed to restrain their mutual animosity enough to begin work on a plan to salvage Ford’s North American car and truck business. Fields promised Bill Ford it would be on his desk in ninety days. With a cross-functional group of fifty managers, he and Stevens began a detailed analysis of Ford’s North American automobile business, compared it to the company’s far more successful operations in other parts of the world, and tried to figure out what they needed to do differently to stop the long decline in Ford’s home market. Key elements of the plan were lifted from the recent turnaround of Ford’s Brazilian subsidiary. Others were inspired by the progress Ford was making in Europe.

On November 14, a company holiday, Fields and the senior members of his team came into the office and spent ten hours fine-tuning the details, agreeing on targets and gut-checking one another’s assumptions. When they were satisfied they had gotten it right, they began writing it up for the board of directors. Fields called it “The Way Forward,” borrowing the Churchillian phrase from a documentary he had watched on the BBC before leaving London. The Ford plan called for idling fourteen factories in North America, including seven assembly plants, by 2012. Closing them would require UAW approval, so that would have to wait until the next round of contract talks. Between 25,000 and 30,000 factory jobs would also be eliminated. Fields hoped to take out about half of these through attrition, the rest through voluntary buyouts that would also have to be negotiated with the union. In addition, Ford would cut another 4,000 salaried positions and reduce the number of corporate officers by 12 percent. Fields set a goal of shedding $6 billion in material costs by 2010 and aimed to reduce Ford’s North American manufacturing capacity by 26 percent over the next three years.

But as Bill Ford had said in September, the company could not cut its way back to success. It also needed to reconnect with consumers. Using the same approach to demographic research employed by political operatives in election campaigns, Fields’ marketing task force figured out who was most likely to buy Ford’s products, who was least likely, and who was still willing to be convinced. That research revealed that most American consumers wanted to buy an American car or truck—far more, in fact, than the roughly 58 percent of them who had purchased a Ford, GM, or Chrysler product the previous year. The catch was that they wanted those vehicles to be every bit as good as the ones being sold by Japanese automakers. Ford would have to redouble its efforts to improve quality in order to meet their expectations, but Fields saw this as a huge opportunity and was determined to seize it. Rather than trying to beat the Japanese at a game they were already winning or out-Korea the Koreans, he wanted to take Ford somewhere those other companies could not follow. To do that, Ford’s products needed to do more than just say, “Made in America”—they needed to stand up and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Instead of inoffensive appliances, he wanted beefy rides with in-your-face styling that were chock full of innovative features.

Fortunately for Fields, the company had brought in an Englishman to lead a reimagining of Ford’s North American product lineup two years earlier. Though he favored tweed suits and ordered his beer by the pint, Peter Horbury shared Fields’ vision of what Ford should and could be.
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His designs were inspired by things like Conestoga wagons and U.S. Navy fighters. He was determined to capture the American zeitgeist in sheet metal. And he had the ideal flagship for the new Ford—a crossover utility vehicle called the Edge—nearing completion in his design studio.