What does office furniture and self-driving cars have in common? Plenty if you mention the name Jim Hackett.
Sunday night word leaked out that Jim Hackett, the former CEO of Steelcase would be named CEO of Ford Motor. Hackett, a Ford board memeber, had been head of Ford’s Smart Mobility unitsince last year. In an official statement, Hackett said that his goal as Ford CEO is “to create an even more dynamic and vibrant Ford that improves people’s lives around the world, and creates value for all of our stakeholders.”
Hackett, who has been hailed for his long tenure at the helm of Steelcase, previously servedas interim athletic director at the University of Michigan, and he is widely credited for helping to finalize the deal to hire Jim Harbaugh as the school’s head football coach. So far though that hire might be looking questionable as the school, even with Harbaugh, still hasn’t been able to beat The Ohio State University in football - now going on 2,006 days (as of May 24, 2017). Hackett, an Ohio native played football at the school up north under legendary coach Bo Schembechler.
Hackett worked at Steelcase, the world’s largest office furniture manufacturer, for roughly 23 years. Originally joining the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based company in a sales and marketing position, Hackett worked his way up the company through a variety of management jobs; he would eventually take over as CEO in late 1994.
In what could prove to be useful experience for his new job, Hackett was mostly applauded for saving Steelcase from the brink of financial disaster by significantly downsizing the company’s workforce, while outsourcing the manufacturing of a number of components. At the time he faced harsh local criticism, but Hackett took over after Steelcase reported a $70 million fiscal year loss; over the years, Hackett led the company through a reorganization that shed about half of its Grand Rapids area jobs.
Throughout his years as head of Steelcase he repeatedly said Steelcase would become a $4 billion (in sales)company. To this day however, Steelcase remains pretty much locked in at $3 billion in annual revenue. Steelcase’s current market cap is $1.965 billion while Ford’s is $44.2 billion.
As CEO, Hackett’s job is to get the Dearborn, Mich.-based company back in fighting shape after a poor showing by former CEO Mark Fields. “We’re going to come back with plans to keep the fitness level high,” said Hackett, a theme he repeated often during his first meeting with Wall Street analysts and reporters. “The fitness of the company is something we’ll never quit talking about.”
To improve Ford’s competitiveness, for example, he said he’ll closely examine Ford’s cost of capital to make sure it’s investing in the right businesses to maximize the return to shareholders, something its crosstown rival General Motors has already been doing for several years, shedding businesses with limited profit potential. “The first thing I’m going to do is to be tearing into that to see if we’re aggressive enough,” Hackett said.
Hackett said he’ll also focus on strengthening Ford’s culture and uniting employees behind a shared view of the future. Alan Mulally succeeded in unifying Ford’s workforce when he was CEO from 2006 to 2014, but under Fields Ford slid back into familiar turf battles and bureaucratic hierarchies, insiders say.
Putting a furniture guy in charge of a car company that’s trying to reinvent the way people get from Point A to Point B is not as strange as it sounds, said Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman and great-grandson of founder Henry Ford.
“Jim ran Steelcase for 20 years; that alone is a huge accomplishment,” said Ford. “But what happened during those 20 years is most instructive. He took a company that defined itself as a furniture maker and said, ‘No - let’s imagine the future of the workplace, how people will want to work in the future and then design our company around that’.”
Importantly, at Steelcase, Hackett created a “culture of optimism and a feeling they could get things done easily because they have a very clear view of the future,” said Ford. BoF