Can This Man Save The American Auto Industry?

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In creating a management team for his new vision, Ford deliberately chose executives who have either come from other companies or spent time at divisions overseas, where they developed fresh perspectives. Fields, a baby-faced former sales and marketing guy with a smooth, confident touch, returned to Detroit in September after 10 years overseas, where he turned around Mazda in a difficult Japanese environment and then took on troubles at Ford in Europe, which is now profitable. "[Ford] has given me and my management team [the leeway] to turn the ship around," says Fields. "But he expects us to deliver--and told us that." Anne Stevens, who heads manufacturing in North America, is a tough-talking engineer from New Jersey ("You got a problem with that?" she says with a laugh) whose style contrasts notably with Ford Motor's mild-mannered Midwestern culture. Fields and Stevens, often referred to as Mark and Anne in the same breath, are the people Bill will rely on to steer the turnaround.

Bill Ford was never particularly comfortable with his country-club world, anyway. His father William Clay Ford, brother of longtime chairman Henry II, chaired Ford Motor's finance committee and bought the Detroit Lions. His mother Martha Parke Firestone (yes, that Firestone) was already an auto blueblood. Although educated at the élite institutions of Hotchkiss and Princeton, Bill was especially interested in labor and what working people do. His passions tended toward sports, American history and the environment. His parents hoped he would not grow up a snob, and his mother drove him across town to play hockey in a working-class league instead of in the fancier Grosse Pointe, where he grew up. He still plays twice a week--right wing--in a competitive league.

Even playing cards or games at home was practically a contact sport. "It was always kind of 'last man standing' stuff," says Sheila, his older sister by five years. "Being the only boy, Billy didn't want to get beaten by his dumb sister, and I certainly didn't want to get beaten by my dorky brother." Being into sports, says Sheila, who played on the tennis team at Yale, taught the young Fords a sense of meritocracy. "It didn't matter who you were," she says. "You either played well or you didn't."

Nor did Ford always assume he would work for the family firm. "He was a bit of a rebel as a young man," says Robert Kreipke, in-house corporate historian. "There was a bit of the 'corporations are the bad guys' thing. He wrestled with that. But in the end, he thought he could maybe change things from the inside." He has worked all over the company, from the assembly line to the labor-relations department to running Ford's Switzerland operation. When he became chairman, Ford pushed two projects that have since become important signs of where the company is heading: he rebuilt the Rouge plant, which now has a roof of green grass, skylights and a program that turns polluting paint fumes into hydrogen fuel cells, and produced the Escape Hybrid, the first SUV hybrid to hit the market.