I read an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the new Ford CEO. He talked a lot about the things he was doing to turn Ford around. His statements sounded reasonable as far as they went. However, his basic prioritizing referred to things that were obvious to myself before he took over---just from reading the Wall Street Journal. I refer to the fact that Ford is now building too many SUVs and large cars and has been doing so for a while.
After this rather broad initial analysis, he starts to descend directly into the daily minutia of running each of Ford's many different sections. I would've liked a sharper, deeper cutting analysis of Ford's overall problems---even if he wasn't yet sure what he was going to do about them.
Apparently, he started running Boeing shortly before the 9/11 disaster delivered a major shock to the company---I think it was in the year 2000 that he took over. According to the article, he apparently navigated Boeing through that period of time, which was a great setback to Boeing. Again according to the article, he did very well and turned things around for the company after 9/11.
However, it seems to me to Boeing's major crisis was earlier than this---in the 90s. Furthermore, it seems to me that their major coup of the last 20 years, the Dream liner, was decided on, conceived, and largely developed in the 90s as well. Perhaps my memory is not completely accurate in this matter (excuse my laziness in not googling it up).
But imagine a scenario in which an ace ship captain agrees to take over the Titanic shortly after it has made contact with the iceberg. Suppose he was skillful enough to have avoided hitting the iceberg had he been at the helm. Could he really make a difference after contact had been made? And wouldn't his willingness to take over the ship at that time tell us something about his ability to make assessments?
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Addendum to the post: Another thing I did not like about the Ford CEO was his response to the question of whether he needed to determine who the good people were and turn over the management at all.
First of all, he evaded the question. He evaded it deftly but is this skill what Ford needs at this point?
The implication finally was that he did not change his top managers, as far as I could tell. he talked about "building a team." He said we have all the people we need on a 16-person committee, every one required for success is included. To me, this is status quo management talk, not entrepreneurial talk and an entrepreneurial approach is needed in a major turnaround.
To the question of whether he evaluated his top people he replied that he had plenty of already-completed evaluations available in the corporate records to be able to do that. Here is a guy who, taking over a company that is completely failing, takes the corporate evaluations at face value. He seems to not realize how filled with mutual back-scratching and perpetually positive these evaluations have a tendency to be in large corporations.
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