EPISODE 10: FIST FULL OF DESPERATION?

William Clay Ford, Jr. finally showed up in a documentary short at www.fordboldmoves.com

Sort of.

Actually it was the disembodied voice of the top man at Ford, heard over the broadband internet connection of the desktop computer in the stark office of Senior Analyst Kevin Tynan at Argus Research. Tynan, who follows Ford Motor Company (tm) for Wall Street (notwithstanding a bulletin board collage of ‘60s and ‘70s GM F-Body sports coupes), was tuned in to FoMoCo’s July webcast of its Second Quarter 2006 results.

Bill’s clipped, near monotone voice announced what Tynan and everyone close to FoMoCo already knew: Ford had lost millions in the Second Quarter.

Such was the "drama" of "Episode 10: Fist Full of Doubters" at www.fordboldmoves.com. Episode 10 ended with a graphic postscript, reporting FoMoCo’s August 2 downward revision of its earlier quarterly report and Bill Ford’s promise that FoMoCo would figure out what to do within the "next 60 days."

Of course Episode 10 debuted nearly halfway through that "60 day" period. Such lengthy delays wouldn’t be unusual in print media, but given the immediacy of the internet, Episode 10 seems a bit stale and perhaps overly processed for something purportedly being a "candid" look inside the company.

Maybe it suffers from the same problem identified by the "Go Fast Product Team" and Thomas Ardon in Episode 9 – "Too many committees" . . . Ford is a "huge ship that takes forever to turn."

(Amazingly, various FoMoCo executives in Episode 9 admitted that a simple tape-stripe and minor hop-up job like the Mustang Shelby GT would take TWO YEARS to work its way through the bureaucratic morass in the Glass House. Carroll Shelby said it would take his Las Vegas bunch only about three months to accomplish the same task.)

Mark Fields, FoMoCo’s Executive Vice President for the Americas, was (again) the real star of Episode 10 (one wonders how Fields really feels about all the "Waiting for Ghosn" speculation)

Fields told a huge auditorium of FoMoCo bureaucrats that "it’s very easy to be negative." In a more intimate shot, Fields opined "everything in the middle looks like a failure." (And he wasn’t talking about the disappointing, V8-less FWD Volvo and Mazda hand-me-downs which comprise the vast majority of FoMoCo’s "Way Forward" sedan line-up) He also complained that the "Way Forward" did not anticipate the double hit of inflation in materials costs and expensive Summer-time fuel. Fields’s general rhetoric aimed at bucking up the sagging morale of FoMoCo investors and stakeholders, suggesting in vague terms that it may look bad now, but the "Way Forward" really can’t be pegged a failure yet.

But Episode 10 ended with another, more alarmist excerpt from Fields’s pep talk: "Time is up!"

The real problem with Episode 10, beyond its lack of timeliness, is that it does not give any indication the Glass House gang knows anything other than that losing money is a problem. It’s easy to chide folks for negativity, but leadership is focusing, step-by-step on driving people in a positive direction. Yet the message of Episode 10 was nothing more than "trust us, we know it’s bad, but we’ve got a plan." It seemed like desperate words from desperate men.

No wonder Bill Ford shied away from being on camera.

Two recent stories indicate the depth of the problem at FoMoCo. First, www.edmunds.com did a brief comparison piece of two new 3.5 liter V6s hitting the market: Ford’s long-awaited Duratec 3.5 and Nissan’s VQ35 HR.

Ford’s lump, slated for the upcoming Ford Edge, Lincoln MKX and MKZ, pumps out a reported 265 horsepower and will only be hooked to a six-speed automatic in its initial installations.

But Edmonds reported Nissan’s 3.5 will rip out 306 horsepower when it shows up in the next Infiniti G35 and Nissan 350Z. It will also be coupled with either a six-speed manual or a paddle-shifted six-speed slushbox. And all of this will come with 10 percent better fuel efficiency than Nissan’s current V6 in that class.

The Glass House bureaucrats and the FoMoCo Kool-Aide (tm) drinkers undoubtedly say that’s an unfair comparison. But is it? How many committees whacked down the output of the Duratec? How many naysayers and pennypinchers thought that it would be "enough" to run mid-pack among the current Japanese V6s – failing to anticipate that Nissan and probably others would be moving the target upward? How badly were FoMoCo’s powertrain engineers restricted because some Ivy-League trained business analyst could not "make a business case" for a class-leading engine?

The second story is on Page 31 of Ford Racing’s magazine Inside the Oval. Entitled "SVT Project File: Cobra Vic," and written by SVT insider John M. Clor, the piece chronicles construction of 18 high performance Crown Victorias for the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. Bondurant – once upon a time affiliated with FoMoCo – needed replacements for some SVT Contour sedans used for training classes. Because Bondurant relied on Jack Roush to prepare the school cars, he looked Roush for a solution. Roush basically swapped a 2001 Cobra driveline (manual transmission and all) into FoMoCo’s Police Interceptor and then tweaked the suspension and support systems for a life of harsh school duty in the Arizona desert.

The story recognizes the Cobra Vics were reminiscent of Mercury’s underperforming and delayed-to-market Panther-based hot rod – the Marauder. But the Roush car obviously hit the muscle car formula a little closer.

The best vignette from the story is when a couple of Grosse Point area cops pulled over Clor in one of the Cobra Vics:

"They stopped us not because were violating any laws, but because they wanted to know if the Cobra Vic was some kind of prototype police car. . . . They wished aloud that Ford would sell a Police Interceptor with this much performance capability."

The sad thing is, they’re still wishing.

And that, in a nutshell, is much of FoMoCo’s problem. Ford is perennially late to market, if at all. It fails to use obvious resources already on the shelf elsewhere in the company. And the tardy result is often mid-pack at best in the key areas which capture the opinion leaders’s eyes and the enthusiasts’s hearts. Thus, whatever "quality" FoMoCo products possess, is obscured in the hyper-competitive sea of the international marketplace by FoMoCo's failure to iron out the critical details essential to market and niche leadership. Ford’s "just enough", "little bit of market share" mentality is the recipe for mediocrity, malaise and, ultimately, the sorts of declines FoMoCo is experiencing today.

And although the foregoing examples are low-hanging fruit from FoMoCo’s ongoing mismanagement of the high-performance niches of its business, examples of such mediocrity can be found throughout the FoMoCo empire.

It’s the "vision thing," as our forty-first President George H. W. Bush said. And nothing in Episode 10 or in the recent news suggests that FoMoCo gets it yet.