Longtimer

Well... I've been at Ford now for 27 years, and have witnessed all the wonderful "processes" and "programs" that have been used to identify, hire, and promote managers; and unfortunately we are now reaping what we've sown over all this time, with a great number of totally incompetent people in our lower and middle management ranks. Those incompetent managers are now making decisions. They are also selecting the next generation of managers to lead this company. It's going to take some fresh blood, frank talk, and guts to clean out the dead wood... and we are inundated with it. Anyone who can look at our advertising over the past 10 years and not see total incompetence in the Marketing and Sales organization is living in a dream world. Why did we build the Thunderbird? Or the Ford GT? Or the Mercury Marauder? There was a golden opportunity to show the world that we can and do build exciting products, and these cars should have been PLASTERED all over our advertising to tell that story. This "Build it and they will come" philosophy of marketing deserves a lion's share of the blame for where we are today. I was fortunate enough last year to have a Thunderbird as a mgt lease car, and showed it off to everyone I could. On two separate occasions, when my friends first saw the car, they absolutely raved about it, yet neither of them knew what it was until I told them. One of them even went so far as to ask me if it was a CHRYSLER product!!!! Yeah, we need to build exciting products... but we also need to SELL them when we do! Bill inherited a huge mess from Jacuzzi Jac... I just hope he's not too nice a guy to do what needs to get done here.