Bill Ford steps down.
Originally Posted by Reuters
Ford names Alan Mulally CEO
DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. (F) on Tuesday named Alan Mulally president and chief executive officer, and said Bill Ford will remain executive chairman.
Mulally was most recently executive vice president at the Boeing Company.
I'll try to find a longer article. I think this just happened a few minutes ago.
^ New dude.
Edit: Extended Wall Street Journal article... http://online.wsj.com/google_login.h...googlenews_wsj
Ford Motor Co., in a surprise move, reached outside the auto industry to name senior Boeing Co. executive Alan Mulally as its new chief executive officer.
Current CEO William Clay Ford Jr. will remain chairman of the auto maker.
Mr. Mulally, 61 years old, a Boeing executive vice president who heads its important commercial airplanes division, will take the Ford president and CEO post immediately as the struggling auto maker prepares a vast restructuring of its unprofitable North American business.
"Clearly, the challenges Boeing faced in recent years have many parallels to our own," Mr. Ford said in a statement.
Mr. Ford, 49, plans to remain an active chairman and work in partnership with Mr. Mulally, according to people familiar with the situation. The two men first met in late July and hit it off, these people say. Mr. Ford launched a full-scale courtship to lure Mr. Mulally, an engineer who's been with Boeing his entire career.
The naming of Mr. Mulally is a risky move to bring in an outsider to run Ford at this critical juncture, when the company is in the process of accelerating a restructuring plan after posting a bigger than expected loss in the first half of the year.
Ford, like its larger rival General Motors Corp., has been losing market share in the U.S. to foreign rivals such as Toyota Motor Corp. in trying to rein in costs. For the first time, Toyota passed Ford as the nation's number-two auto seller this summer.
Also, Ford and other U.S. auto makers have also been hurt by lackluster sales of trucks and sport utility vehicles -- which have long been profit centers -- as consumers worry about high gasoline prices.
But Mr. Ford was attracted to Mr. Mulally because of his experience in overseeing and turning around complex manufacturing operations at Boeing. In recent weeks, Mr. Ford has made it clear inside and outside the company that he was willing to bring in a leader from the outside if the right person was found.
Mr. Mulally also will become a Ford director. At Boeing, he was responsible for all of its commercial airplane programs and related services, which in 2005 generated record orders for new business and sales of more than $22.6 billion. He joined Boeing in 1969 as an engineer.
At Boeing, Scott E. Carson, 60, was named president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, succeeding Mr. Mulally.
Nothing Off the Table
Mr. Ford, in an email to Ford workers and in recent interviews, has said the auto maker needs to overhaul its business model and make radical changes in order to restore profitability. He has said that nothing is off the table as the company pursues its restructuring, including asset sales, alliances and management changes.
In an email to employees last week, Ford acknowledged the company's business model -- which relies on pickup trucks and SUVs for most of its profit margin -- is "no longer sufficient to sustain profitability." And in an interview with Newsweek, Ford said he's willing to relinquish his own position if the right executive came along. Ford also told BusinessWeek magazine recently that "radical changes" are needed to restore the company to profitability.