Reinventing Ford - Embattled automaker puts a regular bloke at

Okay, here's the skinny on Ford CEO Alan Mulally: He's not a car guy. You probably figured that out already, though. After all, any guy who actually chose to drive a Lexus ES-basically an overstuffed Camry with delusions of grandeur-as Mulally did while he was at Boeing, ain't likely to have high-octane pumping through his veins. Mulally can give you chapter and verse on the new Taurus. But he struggles to name-check the Shelby GT500. You get the idea.

In truth, though, Ford Motor Company doesn't desperately need a car guy running the place right now. What it desperately needs is leadership. And that's one thing Alan Mulally, now a year into the top job at Dearborn, seems to be delivering.

Ford's P.R. flacks have been careful to maintain a discreet distance between Mulally and the automotive press until now. They wanted to make sure the new guy had his feet under the desk before letting him face the press. But there comes a time when that "new-guy" schtick doesn't cut it anymore. Which is why I've only just gotten to meet the man running America's second-largest automaker.

Mulally seems like a regular guy. I know, they used to say that about Bill Ford Jr., too, but Bill is a regular guy only in the sense that he pulls his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us. Other than that, he's the wealthy scion of an auto-industry dynasty who works in a building with his name on it, writ large. Mulally comes across as a Kansas boy made good-which he is-in a plain-speaking, Harry S Truman kind of way. A sample quote: "It was disrespectful to the customer to change the name of the Taurus."

Insiders say Mulally has a laser-lock focus on four key elements of his turn-around plan for embattled Ford: right-sizing the company to operate profitably at reduced demand levels; accelerating development of new products and services; securing the financing to do both those things; and getting buy-in from interested parties as diverse as staff, dealers, and the UAW. And he makes sure anything and everything he and his newly downsized senior management team discuss at their regular Thursday meetings is addressed in the context of those four elements.

Ford's collection of premium automakers, accumulated like so many bright, expensive baubles over the past two decades, is being dismantled. Aston Martin is already gone, the sale of Jaguar and Land Rover is proceeding, despite the credit squeeze that's hurting the ability of private equity groups to borrow money at good rates, and the company will decide whether to keep Volvo when a strategic review is concluded in the next three months.

The admission that even Volvo-the most deeply integrated of the brands and therefore the most difficult to disentangle-might be put on the block shows how far Mulally is prepared to go to reinvent Ford. "We have a couple of limited resources," he says. "The first is cash; the second is management time. All our premium brands have taken cash and management time." Only Mazda, with its strong Asian presence, seems certain to remain part of Ford.

Mulally's vision for Ford is of a simpler, more stripped-down affair; a company less ashamed of its heritage as a manufacturer of value-for-money mainstream cars and trucks. Huh? Ashamed? You bet. Over the past decade, I've been struck by how many senior managers' car spaces at Ford facilities were filled with Jaguars or Land Rovers. It made me wonder: If the folks who built Ford cars didn't want to drive them, how the hell did they expect their customers to want to drive them, either?

Back to basics. It's what made Ford Motor Company an industrial powerhouse in the early 20th century. And maybe it's what Ford needs in the early 21st century to become an industrial powerhouse once again.