Ford's New Boss to Follow Lead of Toyota to Streamline Automaker

Washington DC - November 13, 2006: The AIADA newsletter reported that during an hour-long interview with the Detroit News, Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally said Friday that he plans to weld Ford's disparate regional divisions and brands into a single global operation capable of competing with Toyota, the company he most admires in the world.

"There's not one Ford. There's Ford of North America, there's Ford of South America, there's probably three Fords that make up Ford of Europe. There's Australia. There's China, India – there's a lot of Fords, and they're operated very separately as business units," Mulally said. "We've got to go from where we are to leverage our global assets to compete as one company going forward."

The new CEO wants to find ways to build more cars and trucks off common platforms as a way to share parts. In pursuit of these goals, Mulally intends to learn from Toyota's production system, which he called "the machine that changed the world."

Mulally said, "I'm a disciple of the Toyota production system. This system of continually improving the quality, putting the variations into the product line that people want and doing it with minimum resources and minimum time is absolutely where we have to go.

If you look at Ford, it's the antithesis." Mulally said the company must turn around its struggling North American operations by 2009 or risk running out of cash.