joeware - never stop exploring... :)

LOL. Yeah the AFA wishes they had that kind of power. 🙂 That sounded pretty funny to me though as a title. Maybe it will attract some AFA folks to read this blog… if so… tend to your knitting people. 🙂 If you don’t like that Ford and in fact all of the large car companies support gay rights then walk or take a bus. If you don’t like what is on a certain channel on TV, exercise your choice and some intelligence and turn the channel; some of us want to watch those shows.

Although that wasn’t the reason, Bill Ford did indeed step down…

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1865860,00.html

This isn’t very surprising. It has been quite a while in coming. I think Bill was hampered from making the changes in the company that he needed to make. There are a couple of reasons: First and probably most importantly, his name is on the side of the building and the company was founded as a family business and there are still folks around there that recall the days of his grandfather and father which were smaller simpler times. Second, he is actually, seemingly, a nice guy. Nice guys don’t seem to do all that well in business when things get tight.

Now that someone else comes in, they can be the cleanup person and do all the mean nasty things that needed to be done that Bill himself couldn’t easily pull off without looking extremely bad. This new guy comes in with the specific job of “fixing Ford” so people are going to give him leeway and when things start looking up, cheer him as the saviour even if it is due to programs that Bill put into play or was vision he had already put forth. There are other examples  of this, look around. 

Personally I think one of Ford’s big problems is that their vehicles just aren’t exciting.  I mean they have some outrageously exciting things like the Ford GT and the new Mustang’s, but it isn’t enough. Their cars don’t appeal to the younger folks it seems. This doesn’t bode well for Ford long term. I used to sell Fords a long time ago when the new Dodge Ram came out and there wasn’t a salesperson at my dealership I was at or several others we kept in touch with that didn’t want to have one of those Rams. Most of the main Ford lineup just doesn’t have the same zing factor as the other lines. The Ford GT and the Mustang have limited markets, it can’t keep them afloat.

Another problem I think I mentioned in a previous post is the “old boy’s club”. Folks who have been around Ford for a long time and think that because they have been around a long time they automatically have good judgement. They sit in rather high positions and stop change from occurring that they didn’t themselves instigate or push through really stupid stuff that they do want. Not all of them are like that but there are a good number of folks who just didn’t seem to want to do things in a good way, they wanted it their way and by damn they have been at Ford for xx years and they know more about how things should be handled than this that or the other person who has only been at the company x years and they will prove it by going to their friends they came up the ranks with and having the other person thumped versus proving out that they know more or have a better idea.

Yet another problem is I think that the company needs to fully embrace the fact that IT and technology is the way to cut costs and run more efficiently and with less cost. You have some areas like the Active Directory folks who run a very tight ship with 3 support analysts doing an amazing job with every dime they get in funding and then you see other areas stumbling over themselves in stupidity and uselessness. The battle cry of the Plant managers is “We build cars, not computers” and is uttered anytime IT is trying to implement something that the plant manager’s don’t like, so basically that means anything that can be used to cut costs and make the company overall more efficient and cost effective but makes the plant feel a second of pain to put into place. More than once I would get yanked into an issue in a plant that had nothing to do with anything my group supported and I would just be amazed that we kept the doors open… I might have said once or twice (a week or so) that we seemed to succeed despite ourselves. And although I was a contractor, I did say WE not they. I was 100% invested… That wasn’t always the case with everyone there, possibly that is the line to start cutting at. If someone working there says Ford and describes them as THEY instead of WE, they get to see Ford from the outside. They are followed by ANYONE who says… we build cars, not computers as the reason why they won’t allow an IT initiative to be completed.

I believe Ford will straighten out and succeed, but they won’t be able to continue to do so despite themselves any longer, IMHO. It will take a lot of work and a lot of people are going to be leaving the company. Hopefully the RIGHT people will be leaving the company. There is a lot of dead weight that isn’t accomplishing anything but the destruction of the company and that needs to be trimmed off before it takes the rest of the company down. I can think of a handful of people leaving that could really hurt them but I can think of hundreds or possibly thousands of people I have met that could leave and the company would be enormously enriched.

The interesting thing to me now that I am out in the open world of consulting is that I see other manufacturing based companies with the same rally cry but insert their product here instead of saying cars.  Lots of people just don’t want to change and that isn’t good for companies. Companies cannot remain stay the same. The only thing that is constant in the business world is change. They need to transform to keep up with the changing times and changing technology. Failure to accept change is crazy. Failure to change is death.

Good luck Ford.