Mark Fields was fond of saying that Ford Motor Company needed to keep “one foot in the present and one foot in the future”. Mr Fields lost his footing entirely this week and was fired as Ford’s chief executive.
The man chosen to take his place is Jim Hackett, former chief executive of Steelcase, the Midwestern office furniture company one 50th of the size of Ford by revenues. Mr Hackett made his name by remodelling Steelcase, then temporarily heading the University of Michigan’s ailing athletics programme and deftly recruiting a star coach for the Wolverines football team.
So, Mr Hackett is big in Michigan. Whether his talents are sufficient to match Henry Ford’s self-confident declaration in 1925 that his eponymous company was “large in scope as well as great in purpose”, having “dared to try out the untried with conspicuous success”, is another matter.