Some companies take a cookie-cutter approach to selecting their CEOs. They might favor home-grown talent, for instance, or engineers steeped in the company’s products, or salespeople who excel at spinning a corporate yarn. The next CEO tends to look like the previous CEO, and will be followed by someone cut from the same cloth.
“Having led Steelcase from cubicle purveyor to designer of sleek open-plan offices, Hackett has a similar transformation in mind for Ford.”
Ford Motor Co., on the other hand, follows no discernible pattern at all. In the past two decades alone it has toggled from an operations whiz (Jacques Nasser) to a young scion of its founding family (Bill Ford) to an exec who was an automotive neophyte (Alan Mulally) and back again to another true-blue insider (Mark Fields).
With the unexpected sacking of Fields this spring and the appointment of 62-year-old former Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, Ford has once again zigged where before it had zagged. Hackett isn’t a car guy. And unlike Mulally, who had previously piloted Boeing’s commercial airplane business, he hasn’t run a giant industrial concern. Instead, Hackett is as close to an intellectual as the executive suite is ever likely to see, a strategist obsessed by so-called design thinking as a blueprint for doing business. As a young CEO, Hackett traveled annually to the chin-stroking TED conference long before it was cool. Over the years he has drawn inspiration from thinkers as diverse as “complex systems” theorist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and the late University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler. (Hackett was a reserve offensive lineman for the Wolverines in Schembechler’s heyday.)