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LISTENING A NUMBER ONE * USA/FORD: Mulally's Job One: Global overhaul
CEO wants to use Toyota model to streamline FordDetroit,Mich,USA -The Detroit News, by Bryce G. Hoffman - 11 Nov 2006: -- Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Alan Mulally said Friday that he plans to weld Ford's disparate regional divisions and brands into a single global operation capable of competing with the company he most admires in the world: Toyota Motor Corp.... "There's not one Ford. There's Ford of North America, there's Ford of South America, there's probably three Fords that make up Ford of Europe. There's Australia. There's China, India -- there's a lot of Fords, and they're operated very separately as business units," Mulally said. "We've got to go from where we are to leverage our global assets to compete as one company going forward."... Ford has long been a balkanized company, plagued by infighting between different regions and business units. These turf wars have scuttled the best efforts of more than one Ford executive, but Mulally says he has found a way to cut through the ossified fiefdoms... "This is not new news that the automobile industry is shrinking," Mulally said. "It's been going on for four years. Nothing has changed. So we are at a defining moment. Are we going to embark on a transformation of the product line and the production system and create a viable company going forward?"... Ultimately, his job is to transform Ford from a big, failing company to a smaller one that has a chance to not only survive, but prosper... Mulally intends to learn from Toyota's production system, which he called "the machine that changed the world"... "I'm a disciple of the Toyota production system," Mulally said, explaining that he became a student of the Japanese automaker while working as an engineer at Boeing and has traveled to Japan to study how Toyota's factories operate. "This system of continually improving the quality, putting the variations into the product line that people want and doing it with minimum resources and minimum time is absolutely where we have to go. If you look at Ford, it's the antithesis."... And the clock is ticking. Mulally said the company must turn around its struggling North American operations by 2009 or risk running out of cash... (Photo by Ankur Dholakia/The Detroit News - Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Alan Mulally)
* USA - Fortune mag runs over Ford's image
Detroit,Mich,USA -The Detroit News -11 Nov 2006: -- It was bad enough that Fortune magazine referred to new Ford Motor Co. President and CEO Alan Mulally as a "student driver" and called his firm "a profoundly dysfunctional company" that is "going down the tubes." ... But the magazine added insult to injury in its latest edition by accidentally using a Toyota Tundra pickup instead of one of Ford's own F-150s to illustrate the story. The rival pickup appeared on each page of the story, adding a fresh dash of salt to each cut the article took at the struggling automaker and its new leader. One Ford executive suggested making up a set of vehicle identification cards for Fortune, like those given to aircraft spotters during World War II. The Insider thinks the word "Tundra" on the side of the vehicle should have been a sufficient clue...
posted by Unknown @ 10:37 AM
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