Listen to Ford Motor Co.’s excitable CEO, Alan Mulally, for five minutes and you are almost ready to march down to the assembly line, grab a torque wrench and start knocking bolts into Mustangs. “We are fighting for the soul of American manufacturing,” he begins. “We are leading the way on, What does it take for America to compete in the global economy? That’s what this is about. And it starts with making the best products in the world. That’s why we can have this lifestyle — because you have to earn it.” Ford is certainly earning quite a bit of it. After the industrial Armageddon that left GM and Chrysler in bankruptcy and the car industry’s 5,000 top suppliers hanging by a fraying fan belt, Ford is flying the flag of resurgence. The company earned $2.6 billion on sales of $31.3 billion in its second quarter. Its pretax operating profit — a measure of how well the core business is running — was $2.9 billion, vs. a loss of $424 million a year earlier. Ford’s market share jumped 1.4 points, to 17.5%, at the expense of GM and Chrysler. In rankings compiled by Kelley Blue Book, an auto-marketing research firm, Ford recently claimed the top spot from troubled Toyota as the best-regarded auto brand in the U.S. Pulling off the biggest business turnaround of the Great Recession has been a pretty good second act for Mulally, who turns 65 on Aug. 4. The CEO arrived at Ford in late 2006 after 37 years at Boeing, amid some sniping that he wasn’t a “car guy” — as if the car guys in Detroit were doing a bang-up job. Yet if Ford is going to change gears from world-class survivor to world-class manufacturer, Mulally will have to show that he is indeed a car guy — just his own kind of one.
