After 28 years as a loyal company man, Mark Fields was asked to resign from his post as president and CEO of Ford Motor Company on Friday. He’s retiring at age 56 and has been replaced by former Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, a board member since 2013 who has been heading the Ford Smart Mobility subsidiary for about a year. Fields’s brief three years behind the wheel alongside executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. was a period of record profitability and positive cash flow. But it wasn’t enough.
Ford’s shares fell almost 40 percent in value since Fields replaced Alan Mulally in 2014, and the discontent with the company’s stock performance appeared to reach new heights at its annual meeting earlier this month. It was then, Reuters reports, that 35 percent of shareholders voted to end the dual-class voting structure that gives the Ford family two-fifths of a vote. The vote didn’t pass, but the message was sent. On Monday, both Hackett and Bill Ford sought to play down the role that the company’s lagging shares played in the management shakeup; however, words like “culture” and “hierarchy” came up more than once. It’s clear that Ford wants decisions to be made faster and that he wants the company to get a boost that perhaps only fresh blood can bring.
Mulally, another outsider, was also mentioned more than once. He came to Ford from Boeing in 2006 to turn the automaker around when it was facing a $17 billion los...