Personally, I think Ford lost its way beginning with hiring Jim Hackett as CEO.
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@OP What's so bad about having a desk drawer in your vehicle's instrument panel? Having swivel-casters instead of tires is what I didn't like!🤣
In my view, Alan Mulally was the last Ford CEO to deliver a broadly recognized transformation in the company’s operating performance and strategic direction. Since his departure, Ford’s leadership record has been considerably more mixed, with persistent challenges in profitability, product execution, capital allocation, quality, and shareholder returns.
Those outcomes warrant scrutiny of both executive leadership and the Board of Directors, whose responsibility includes selecting, overseeing, and holding management accountable for performance. The Ford family’s continued influence through its voting control also makes its role in corporate governance relevant to that discussion.
The criticism should ultimately be based on measurable results—operating margins, free cash flow, quality and warranty costs, market share, product launches, restructuring charges, and long-term shareholder returns—rather than assumptions about individual executives’ motives or qualifications. By those measures, there is a legitimate question as to whether Ford’s leadership and governance since Mulally have consistently delivered the level of operational discipline and long-term value creation that investors and employees should expect.
It will be Alexandra English. Bail out of your job and stock holdings before that disaster happens.
@OP Someone from the Ford family perhaps? My apologies. I thought you asked about RUINING the company and they already are!
@ad his mom fired him in 2008 after he sold the rights to the Ford logo/name. Not saying
It was a good or bad decision but his mom is very much in charge still of him and the family side of the business
I would rather see Bill Ford just run the company rather than trusting the helm to people who don't have a real stake in the company.
Alicia Boler Davis should be next in line if Ford opens the CEO job. She already runs Ford Pro, the company’s highest-margin business, and her résumé is built for the actual problems in Dearborn: plants, quality, labor, and cost. At GM she rose from manufacturing engineer to executive vice president of global manufacturing, reporting to the CEO and running launches across roughly 150 facilities. At Amazon she ran global fulfillment through the pandemic and scaled a robotics-heavy network. She has also been a CEO, taking Alto Pharmacy past $1 billion in revenue. She is a Detroit native whose father and grandfather worked at Ford, so the company is not an abstraction to her. She would also be Ford’s first woman CEO and its first Black CEO, but that is the footnote. The case is that she has already done the hardest parts of the job.