‘American Icon’ Examines Ford’s Rebound - Review

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Sunday, April 01, 2012

‘American Icon’ Examines Ford’s Rebound - Review

By NANCY F. KOEHN

IN 2008, the Ford Motor Company seemed caught in a death spiral.

The company was hemorrhaging cash — more than $83 million a day — as the bottom fell out of the car market. In late autumn, Ford’s stock price bottomed out at $1.01.

Move forward three years. For 2011, Ford turned a net profit of $20 billion on sales of $128 billion. It distributed profit-sharing payments of about $6,200 to each of 41,600 eligible employees. On Friday, its stock closed at $12.48.

It is a remarkable comeback, all the more noteworthy because Ford was the only Big Three carmaker not bailed out by taxpayer money. In “American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company” (Crown Business: $26), Bryce G. Hoffman recounts the turnaround in careful, often gripping detail.

A reporter for The Detroit News who has covered Ford for six years, Mr. Hoffman bases his account on more than 100 interviews and access to a range of company documents and personal notes of participants. (This access, Mr. Hoffman writes, came without Ford exerting any control over what he wrote.) A result is a compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book.

Make no mistake, this is a story, not a structured analysis of Ford’s transformation. Those looking for how-to lists will be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Hoffman offers Mr. Mulally’s vision for saving — and permanently changing — a giant American company. The author explores how Mr. Mulally and his team executed this vision, and what this meant on the dynamic, risky stage of the auto industry.