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  It isn’t difficult to grasp both the vision that Mulally was striving to outline and the considerable challenges that One Ford faced. Ford employees weren’t a global team—they were disorganized and “siloed,” to use the business-school term for groups of workers and managers who are trapped in their own subworlds of the larger business. Additionally, teamwork wasn’t prioritized; individual competition and survival were.

  Ford was in retreat, like the rest of the auto industry, and fighting the widespread assumption that its technology was of the twentieth century, not the twenty-first. But Mulally knew that auto design, engineering, and manufacturing were technologically sophisticated—much harder undertakings, in many ways, than creating software companies. At a fundamental level, even an inexpensive car needs to be able to withstand rigorous crash testing. Automobiles are made up of thousands of parts, and many of them have to be constructed with great precision. Components have to last for more than a few years. Auto plants are full of huge, multimillion-dollar robots that can sling around an entire chassis while still applying exacting welds. Car designers and engineers now use the latest computer technology to imagine and execute vehicles, and the industry has in recent years been on a hiring spree for computer scientists, as the brains of cars and trucks become increasingly sophisticated—and vulnerable to hackers.

  So the car business aims for innovation, but not at the same paranoid and frantic pace as Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a century, the various technologies that go into the automobile have been refined, re-refined, and extensively fine-tuned. The car that you drive today, one that costs less than $20,000 new and may run for over a decade, resides at the peak of 100 years of industrial evolution.

  It says something about the “traditional” auto industry’s appetite for change that Tesla is the first company to come along with a completely different idea since the internal-combustion engine asserted its dominance prior to World War I. Tesla’s innovation is not about cars—Tesla’s vehicles don’t look radically different from what’s already on the road—but about how cars should be powered. Automakers had experimented with electric cars before Tesla’s arrival—both GM and Toyota sold or leased them in the 1990s, in small numbers—but no one had ever made a 100 percent commitment to going electric.

  Just because an automaker like Ford is very good at building millions of cars annually doesn’t mean the extravagant cost of doing the building has been substantially reduced since the 1950s. In some respects, it has gone up, as consumers have demanded (and the government has required) ever more safety and technology features. Some companies blow through money. Automakers positively inhale it in massive quantities. A billion bucks is nothing to a big global carmaker. That’s about the basic cost to develop a new version of the Ford Focus or Explorer. Designers, engineers, accountants, computer scientists—none of them come particularly cheap, and it takes hundreds and hundreds of people to design those cars, let alone manufacture, market, and sell them. Under normal, non-recessionary conditions, this is fine. So much money sloshes through Ford’s, GM’s, or VW’s accounts and various lines of business that the capital-intensive nature of the business is manageable. But when the downturns come, as they always do, a car company’s mettle is tested.

  Mulally had taken care of the capital challenge with his home-improvement loan. But in his mind that was just the beginning. Ford wasn’t capitalizing on its uniqueness.

  Point three of Mulally’s plan was a bit dicey. Mulally thought Ford had lost touch with the market—and to a degree it had. But in some areas, particularly trucks and SUVs, the market had just temporarily shifted away from Ford owing to external economic pressures. Nonetheless, Ford could be better prepared for these shifts.

  One Ford would of course fail without the billions needed to pull it off. To my mind, this is the most poorly understood aspect of Mulally’s plan: even a simple strategy can cost a lot to execute. One Ford is now a business-school case study, frequently reviewed and pondered by academics. It has also achieved the status of a folk legend. I’ve met Ford employees who still have their tattered One Ford cards, which they carry with them everywhere. When I describe the One Ford plan now, I always note that I’ve never seen such unity in a business before. No one at Ford failed to get it.

  But as simple as the One Ford plan was, its success relied on an enormous infusion of cash: $25 billion (in contrast to Noyce and Moore’s $2.5 million). This is important. You don’t transform major companies on the cheap. Real change required real investment. Without those billions in the bank, it ultimately wouldn’t have worked.

  In the twenty-first century, with Internet companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp being bought for billions after a few years of work, with staffs in the low double digits, there’s a general and pernicious assumption among putative new-business experts that the way to go is cheap and fast—the vaunted “lean start-up.” But that isn’t always the case. Chrysler, GM, and Ford—along with the U.S. network of auto suppliers and auto dealers—account for around 5 percent of the U.S. economy. Fixing something that big can’t be done on a budget.

  Although it can be done fast, as Mulally discovered. When he took the CEO job in 2006, it was apparent that he needed to work with urgency, but the financial crisis accelerated that imperative. It wasn’t a turnaround that he faced—it was survival.

  Mulally didn’t radically revamp the management team, although some executives did eventually depart. Rather, he pressed his managers to collaborate. For some, this was unthinkable: they were Ford lifers who had honed their skills in the old arena, where job one was to take care of number one.

  But circumstances dragged an impressive number of them along with Mulally on his journey, a fortunate development, as the new CEO didn’t have time to remake the company’s leadership. But he had to convince the executives who would commit to his One Ford vision that it was essential to learn two critical new lessons: First, information had to be shared across the company—information both good and bad. Second, to put it bluntly but truthfully, though in words that Mulally would never use, it was OK to fuck up.

  The traditionally male-dominated auto industry is a profane place. You have to get used to highly successful businessmen in beautiful suits, men from the United States and Europe, throwing around language that would make a marine blush. There are now many more women in the business than there were in the past, and they’re tough as well, never hesitating to trot out the rough language when they need to.

  But saying that something is fucked up, as people in the car business became used to doing, and actually admitting you’re the one responsible for fucking something up are two completely different things. The former is an assessment, while the latter is a confession. And asking for forgiveness in the auto industry has typically been regarded as a one-way ticket to the unemployment line.

  At Ford, the culture had evolved not so much to mask fuckups but rather to avoid confronting them until it was too late. Then you could shrug your shoulders, enact your carefully cultivated blame-somebody-else strategy, and challenge the company to pony up for a fix or simply kick the problem down the road. Ford wasn’t alone in this, of course. It was the entire U.S. car business. The culture was nothing like that of a Japanese automaker, where failure could lead to a ritual admission of responsibility and an apology, a cleansing process. In Detroit, the toxic avoidance piled up.

  Mulally didn’t want a whole bunch of fragmented Fords where failure was punished. He wanted one Ford where failure was embraced either as a learning process or as an early trigger to devote team resources to salvaging a product. I thought of it as similar to the way that a healthy body fights off an infection: hitting red alert and swarming the invading bacteria or virus with immune defenses, and thereby temporarily weakening the body’s tendency to have its various parts and systems focused on their own businesses, so that the sickness could be eradicated. This was short-term unpleasant but long-te
rm advantageous. Under Mulally, if there was trouble, a bright light was shone on it, and the resources to alleviate it were mustered. Problems weren’t owned by single managers; in the pre-Mulally era, that single ownership had functioned as a sort of perverse power. Now problems were shared.

  Nobody at Ford understood that better than Mark Fields, who would take over as CEO when Mulally retired in 2014.

  “I guess fortunately,” Fields told me, “our business started deteriorating well before the financial crisis. It’s kind of played out that we had the foresight to go out and get all the financing. But it was just timing. We went into the soup first. Although we never got to the point where we were biting our fingernails because we were worried we were going to run out of money or not be able to make the payroll that month. But it was definitely harrowing.”

  The One Ford plan was a deeply American thing for Mulally to implement. It required a sophisticated, quietly calculating hayseed to pull it off. At some fundamental level, Mulally understood this essential thing about himself: that his appearance was a useful ruse, providing cover for radical action if it was needed. And his actions were radical. From the beginning, he didn’t think that it could all go away, at Ford and in the auto industry more broadly—he knew he had landed in the middle of its actually going away.

  Mulally pushed hard, but it was a cheerful push. In his entire tenure at Ford, he would never once be seen in a suit. At one point, according to Bryce Hoffman’s 2013 account of Ford’s revival, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company, Mulally’s eventual heir, Mark Fields, was so sure that he was out of a job that he simply gave in to Mulally’s mandate for radical managerial transparency and became the first car guy at Ford to label a vehicle troubled.

  Fields—who with his Way Forward plan had begun to lay groundwork to streamline Ford’s operations, such as by closing plants—tells a slightly different story. He was running Ford’s U.S. operations at the time, and he wasn’t sure he was screwed, even though he hadn’t been elevated to the CEO’s office.

  “I wasn’t pissed off,” Fields said. “I had just gotten the job running the Americas. That was a big job, and we had a lot of things to do. We had to fix the business.” But he decided to put aside a career of maneuvering through Ford’s executive offices to do things Mulally’s way.

  “We were a culture where in any given meeting, we would focus on the ten things that were going wrong and maybe the one thing that was going right.”

  That was the old Ford, where managers focused on tearing each other down rather than figuring out how to maximize strengths. The law of the jungle ruled the company: kill or be killed. It didn’t matter if you were picking up market share in Europe or expanding a foothold in China, because it was so much more advantageous to slaughter the guy whose new SUV was running behind in the United States. To make matters worse, the guy whose SUV was running behind would never admit that he had a problem; he would consider asking for help to be career suicide.

  In Hoffman’s book, Fields is depicted repeatedly as a swaggering New Jersey street fighter, who saw his destiny at Ford as a steady march of confrontation. It was the classic path to the top for an American male who wanted to make it big in the bare-knuckle business world of Detroit, where the expensive suits distracted the uninitiated from the boardroom blood sport.

  Fields had lost his private-jet privileges when the cost of a weekend commute to Florida caught the attention of the media, but he was already getting accustomed to Mulally’s quite different approach to doing things.

  More important, Fields’s resigned bravado endeared him to Mulally, who was new on the job when Fields flagged a car, the Ford Edge crossover, as “red”—very troubled. (Green and yellow were the other colors in Mulally’s chromatic matrix of progress reports, updated weekly at the CEO’s main Ford management meeting.)

  Contrary to some accounts, Fields wasn’t on the verge of packing it in at that point. He didn’t see his problem car, which had an issue with its lift gate, the vehicle’s rear hatch, as a perfect opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory.

  “I was never ready to check out on the company,” he told me. “I love the company. But I’m the kind of person who has the inability to accept defeat, and that’s why I’ve gone for the messy assignments. So when Alan came in and we started the [regular business plan review, or BPR], we were coming from being a company where if you showed any weakness, you must not be very competent, and we can get somebody else.”

  And that led to a classic problem of corporate America, according to Fields: “Things were suppressed.” So Fields decided to do something about that.

  There was the Edge problem, which Fields’s launch team had alerted him to. Then the prep team for the BPR came in, and when they showed him his presentation materials, Edge was marked green. “It was about a month after Alan came in, December, and we wanted to ship the vehicles, because we realize the revenue when the vehicle leaves the plant.”

  Fields tells the tale as if it happened yesterday, perhaps internally amused that the chutzpah that had gotten him to the top at Ford, and that some thought might be his undoing, actually kicked in at exactly the right time.

  “I said, ‘Guys, it’s not green. We’re holding the vehicles at the plant.’” But there was a plan, his team said. Fields didn’t need to go into the BPR with a red on his charts.

  “Is it a defined plan?” Fields asked. He wanted to understand the specific steps, so that if Mulally asked for details, he could lay them out. The answer was no.

  “Then we’ve got to call it red.”

  Fields grinned when he got to the next part. “There was dead silence. They all wanted to make the boss look good. They wanted to know I really wanted to do this.”

  Fields patiently explained that Ford had a new leader and what he wanted above all was transparency. “We can’t hide a secret,” Fields said. “Code it red.”

  There were about twenty people assembled around the conference room table for the BPR, and other executives were videoconferencing in from around the world, from Shanghai, Rome, South America. Fields, because of his position and responsibility for North America, went first. After a few minutes, he got to his launch chart.

  “It showed bright red for Edge.” While he was recounting this story, I could tell that he had learned to appreciate the value of a critical moment for Ford as the financial crisis was unfolding. He could have said simply “red,” but he said “bright red.”

  It was that kind of red. On few occasions has the management culture of a 100-year-old company been transformed by one man’s embrace of a primary color.

  “You could hear a pin drop,” he said. “I could actually feel some of the chairs around me start to move away, because two guys in black trench coats are going to come in and haul me out.”

  But they didn’t haul him out. Instead, Mulally said, “Mark, thanks for your transparency.”

  “And the following week,” Fields recollected, “all the charts showed up like rainbows.”

  Fields’s own transformation continued, and much of it could be chalked up to his own appetite to learn from the genial former Boeing exec, who greeted everyone with a smile but still calculated the odds in the back of his mind.

  “What I learned from Alan is the power of positive leadership,” Fields told me. “How do you get the best out of people in really dire situations? He has that skill that politicians have, to make you feel good about a good situation, or a crappy situation, or anything in between.”

  The Mark Fields of 2016, the Ford CEO presiding over record sales quarters for the carmaker and steering the company back to Le Mans, had become a suave operator, a smooth study in usually saying the right thing, refusing to withhold truly bad news, and deploying wit instead of a belligerent attitude. When I told him I had moved to New Jersey, he immediately asked, “What exit?” referring to the Garden State Parkwa
y, a tollway that runs diagonally through the state, forming a socioeconomic spine. It’s the classic inside joke for Jersey natives, (Fields grew up in Paramus).

  Like Mulally, Fields engages warmly with journalists, whereas a decade earlier he might have seen them as foes. When I chatted with him at the offices of Business Insider in New York in 2016, around the time of the New York International Auto Show and the U.S. auto industry’s victory lap after the epic sales of 2015, Fields was more than happy to engage in some ribbing banter about Lincoln head Kumar Galhotra and the transformation of the executive from stern-faced engineer to a smiling, mellow, stylish diplomat. Fields had been an executive who thought about himself first, but Mulally taught him to think about the Ford family—from the factory floor to the heirs to the original Ford fortune. Groomed in a firestorm during the financial crisis, Fields had studied under the best. Mulally’s work at Ford is now widely regarded as one of the most impressive rescue missions in the history of American business. It did all nearly go away. A guy from Kansas prevented Armageddon in Motown. And Fields was clear that just because the industry had recovered was no justification for easing back on the throttle.

  “My grandmother went through the Great Depression. And we went through our own Great Recession and our own cathartic restructuring of the business. That isn’t lost on us. There’s no time to sit back and say, ‘Hey, let’s go have a beer and slack off for a month.’”

  Fields called it staying “riveted” on the business. Mulally’s ongoing legacy has inspired this philosophy, this kind of focus, and this kind of shared responsibility at Ford.

  “We’re proud that we didn’t take the bailout money,” Fields said. “We’re proud we did this on our own.”

  Without Mulally, there would have been no Ford, or at least no Ford as America had grown to know it.

  All this management theory put into practice needed to be more than just a big thought experiment. It needed to work at the level of transforming Ford’s corporate culture. The carmaker’s portfolio of cars and trucks also had to be improved. Coming out of the financial crisis, Ford unquestionably had the best lineup of vehicles in the industry, among mass-market automakers, gathered under a single brand. GM would also come out of bankruptcy selling an excellent range of vehicles—the revival of Buick was particularly impressive—but GM was still a company of several brands, not a single brand. (Ford also had Lincoln and Mercury, but those nameplates weren’t Mulally’s priority, in the beginning, and left to his own devices, he probably would have ditched them.)