More than a century ago, Ford Motor Co. made the automobile a mass-market consumer product accessible to all. Last May, Jim Hackett took over as the company’s CEO and faced a challenge as big as anything Henry Ford ever encountered: to lead the company into a future defined by autonomous vehicles, clean fuel alternatives, and the concept of mobility as a tech-driven mobile service. Hackett talks to Fast Company’s Robert Safian about the need for agility and how it’s shaping his plans to recast Ford’s business model and culture.
Fast Company: You were previously the CEO of another company, Steelcase, which went through some transitions and culture changes. This is a different kind of spotlight.
Jim Hackett: I had this interim assignment as the University of Michigan athletic director where I hired [former star quarterback] Jim Harbaugh as head football coach, so that spotlight was big.
FC: You don’t mind the spotlight?
JH: It’s not painful, [but] I don’t seek it. It feeds some of the wrong things about the way people think of business. The cult of personality as a CEO, there are some people who can pull that off. Very few. I would rather be in the background and be known as a person who’s thoughtful, whom people love to work for, and then the team is in the spotlight. It is the way I was wired, with three older brothers. Roger Enrico, who helped lead Pepsi [from 1983 to 2003], said that leadership is having a point of view. The CEO can’t shrink from that. If you do, the company suffers from confusion, lack of direction. So in my first hundred days [as Ford CEO], we have developed a point of view of the future of the company: “smart vehicles in a smart world.”