Stretched thin, Ford shifts focus

[bystander]

I wish you guys would understand that politics is the reason many people are being let go. Early in my career, one director told me that reorgs are about power, not efficiency. Well right now you have the biggest scramble for power ever seen at Ford. And it's being done in a musical chairs fashion.

 

 

You're probably right about the politics of letting salaried go to appease the greatly-thinned ranks of hourly. Problem is, Ford is in the situation it's in because it hasn't churned out good, new product fast enough. Cutting your new product development capacity by 20-30% doesn't seem like a smart way to respond to that reality. It's certainly not smart to cut good and bad workers indiscriminantly.

[RichardJensen]

Like many actions of the Nasser era, the attempt to revise the performance rating system was poorly executed. Doesn't mean there wasn't a root problem that needed to be addressed and it doesn't mean they should have just given up on trying to correct it. If your toddler is misbehaving, do you give up if your first attempt at discipline results in a temper tantrum?

No matter what you do, you will always have deadwood. If you arbitrarily decide you're going to fire the worst 25% of your workforce, then, in a year, repeat, etc., you'll always be firing 25% of your workforce.

 

Arbitrarily deciding that you're going to 'get rid of the deadwood' is often a method chosen when the structure of the decision making process has become dysfunctional.

 

Execs look at all the people working, and the slow progress of assorted projects, and assume that it's because the worst performers are holding back the entire team.

 

The reality is that decision making has been pushed farther and farther up the chain (in this article, it mentioned that some routine engineering decisions were being made by the VP of a unit--WHY?)

 

And, of course, the farther up the chain, the decision is pushed, the greater the wrath, in the event something goes wrong.

 

Pushing decision making uphill generates (for each level the decision is moved up) another round of paperwork justifying the recommendation, and another delay in decision making.

 

The result is tons of time spent doing basic CYA and meetings.

 

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If the structure remains sclerotic, with upper management making decisions that should be delegated, all the trimming of deadwood in the world will not change things.

 

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If the organizational processes are sound to begin with, and routinely evaluated, the company can work well with an average workforce, and there is no need to periodically 'clear out the deadwood'.

 

Any manager that says, "We need to clear out the deadwood" should start by firing himself.

Edited March 28, 2007 by RichardJensen

[bystander]

I'll tell you this, friend: With no real history of ever casting off ineffective employees, there was and is plenty of dead wood at the Ford Motor Company. I say it's foolish to keep them and give good employees cash to leave.

[Biker16]

I'll tell you this, friend: With no real history of ever casting off ineffective employees, there was and is plenty of dead wood at the Ford Motor Company. I say it's foolish to keep them and give good employees cash to leave.

well develop a way get rid of dead wood that does not result in a lawsuit.

[RichardJensen]

I'll tell you this, friend: With no real history of ever casting off ineffective employees, there was and is plenty of dead wood at the Ford Motor Company. I say it's foolish to keep them and give good employees cash to leave.

As there is plenty of dead wood at Toyota. So..................?

 

The reality is that a streamlined decision making process is more important than periodically conducting purges.

[bb62]

Well, that and, you know, having wayyyyy too many people for the company's footprint in this country.

 

I deserved that by not being specific enough. Clearly you are right that many people have to go given their current and most likely future market share. But it is political as to WHICH people are being asked to go at the management ranks. And from what I've seen (which is no longer current), it was the more often the wrong people being let go.

 

Let me briefly illustrate. When Phil Martens came back from Mazda, the only ideas he had for the rest of Ford were to 1, copy Mazda's platforms (a good idea that led to the Fusion among other vehicles), and 2, copy Mazda's process which could have been a good idea if he insisted that the enablers to the Mazda process also be put in place. But that didn't happen - and it is very typical of Ford to make edits that any "new" process must start making gains from day one. These expectations drive Ford to reduce headcount to the levels that the new process predicts before the right people are in place.

 

What makes the process that Martens copied from Mazda even worse is that it requires a ton of upfront work (that would have saved even more downstream work) that Ford was never prepared to do. So while Mazda was making product decisions based on facts driven by their upfront work, Ford was reduced to making decisions based on the "I think, You think" opinions of the directors and VPs without the requisite data. Putting it in people terms - if Ford needed 100 people (just a plug number) to get the right strategy and they had just 50 people to do the work, the senior guys, knowing the process needed the 100 people (and therefore knowing that they couldn't get the required upfront work done), instead decided not the utilize the 50 people they did have and instead depended on their personal intuition about the market. This allowed them to eliminte the 50 people who could have formed the core of the group required to enable the Mazda process. So the VPs looked like heros for creating their own plan AND reducing headcount. But it leads to the type of problem we have now where Ford's planning process is led by people who don't (and will never) have a clue.

 

This is true of every process Ford has put in place since Ford 2000 and is THE major reason why the company could fail.

[bb62]

The reality is that decision making has been pushed farther and farther up the chain (in this article, it mentioned that some routine engineering decisions were being made by the VP of a unit--WHY?)

 

And, of course, the farther up the chain, the decision is pushed, the greater the wrath, in the event something goes wrong.

 

Pushing decision making uphill generates (for each level the decision is moved up) another round of paperwork justifying the recommendation, and another delay in decision making.

 

The result is tons of time spent doing basic CYA and meetings.

 

 

Richard this is very true. As to the reason why, it's in my prior post.

 

Just a quick comment, sometimes you make comments I don't agree with (especially having been there) and i shake my head and think that you don't get it. In this case with the comments I quoted above, you do GET IT. What you note above plus the inability of the system to generate decisions anymore (given the disasterous reorgs of Ford 2000, Jac, and Billy) is what has directly led to Ford going from the powerhouse left by Poling to the potential basketcase that Mullaly might be incorrectly accused of killing at some future point in time.