Thread regarding Ford layoffs

The Ford family curse on the Lions was from Bobby Layne. For the Oval it was from Lee Iacocca.

Been headed down the drain since the furniture guy!

Ford is cursed by the same family that curses the Lions. Until the Ford family is removed there will be no saving the company.

Our new designs are no longer evolved from things that worked...or worked good enough. Program directors demanding things that nobody cares about. Often the camouflage restrictions were more important than getting valid test data.

Ford can't make a quality vehicle at an affordable price and there there is nothing at the lower end in the NA market. The world vehicles that they thought they could import never happened.

We would be in a much better position if we were still making the Fusion and Continental in Flatrock with an addition of a station wagons. Possibly a low cost Hybrid version.

And get the heck out of these EV super cars and trucks... Spread the resources to Hybrids like Toyota. The EVs work great around town but the need for some clown to make it to his cottage and back are a poor use of resources.

You mention Farley, Doug Field, FLV, etc. but it begins and ends with the family whose name is on the building. Ford is no different than any other family business; just lucky it had a first mover advantage 120 years ago. That gave it enough inertia to still be around today. Now for the present day: the family is what it is. I don’t see the founder’s spirit embodied in any of them. They can employ the services of highly compensated custodians but if the family lacks the ambition/interest/tenacity/etc. how can one expect great things? Imagine owning a professional sports team and YoY they underperform. An owner who wants a trophy would throw everything they could at it to make it work. Think Michael Ilitch when it came to the Red Wings or Tigers for a few seasons. The Lions, not one drop of passion or anger, and the common thread is this company and the Lions share the same owner. Frankly, the family is a victim of coasting off the laurels of what was, not what is to be. Bill sadly is a victim of his echo chamber; the people surrounding him so driven to su-k this company dry that they will say anything but tell him he is wrong. Comfortable existence, yes, but fulfilling? Subjective to the eye of the beholder, anyone can invent fake achievements to make them feel better about life.

IMO, one of the problems with Ford is the current leadership
Is mostly made up of people from other industries or fake people more interested in image than results.

Current leaders examples: CarCar Farley that goes “racing” in classic cars that barely go faster than golf carts; DF and a bunch of other people from the Left/Worst West Coast; and let’s not forget FLV a man that marries a woman with 10k purse. None of the them remotely real regular people that Ford sells and mostly markets to…

Former leaders I knew/met: Allan M, who after two weeks being introduced as CEO was in the WHQ first floor cafe buying his lunch; he did not buy my lunch but he did buy me a soda; Fields was a bit of an ego head, but he worked his way up through Ford for 32 years and knew how to develop and produce vehicles; Joe H who I met at the last car prom in Jan 2019 and he asked me where the fresh made doughnuts were and take back a plateful of them to his table for suppliers and family - never a more regular guy you’ll meet so high up in a top 50 Fortune 500 company; and Marcy K whom worked her way up to Ford CIO from Ford Credit - no more than two months before she was promoted to CIO, I saw her shopping at Target - she saw me and waved to me ( I worked at Credit for years).

See the difference? Current leaders are all wanna be prima donnas, while in the past we used to have pragmatic practical leaders that were not above either their employees or the typical Ford customer. This is the problem & issue…..

The amount of bellyaching that goes on here about DEI is hilarious. Bunch of people who have never accomplished something significant in their careers and feel the need to lash out at others.

@qoq explain again exactly how Mark Fields, Jim Hacket and Jim Farley were diversity candidates and how diversity candidates like Doug Fields are making the decisions that are destroying our company? Either the decisions you have a problem with are being made further down the chain of command and are really just reflections of micro politics of who gets promoted between effectively similar choices, or more likely DEI has nothing to do with what you are upset about? By my math the majority of my bosses LL5+ are older white men

Eliminate DEI

No. Not only change at the very top, but reduce the number of “executives” to less than 50, like our competitors.

They can’t even keep up with who still works here. Gil Gur Arie left Ford weeks ago, posted a farewell message on LinkedIn, but is still listed as a Ford executive, as is FLV, but he cannot be terminated while his court case is in process because Edsel Ford was arrested for the exact same thing at his house in Grosse Pointe Farms a few years ago, minus the $10,000 handbags.

It started with Jack Nasser wanting to model the company after Dell computer where you just plug in different components as it goes down the line. Vehicles are much more complicated, safety, crash testing, Fed. Regulations, resale, ETC. BLI courses were a waist, and was the beginning of DEI. Billy tried but didn't have the guts to fix it. It got better with Mullaly but went back to business as usual after he left. The clowns in between did nothing but bring down morale and quality. Now we are not making cars here and people cannot afford the vehicles Ford does make. By buying into the EV scam that the government is pushing the company looses thousands of dollars per sale but continues to flush more money down the drain. No one is in it for the long haul any more and there is no accountability. The train station is an example of shareholder money being used for feel good non core expenditures. The ship in half sunk.