IDLENESS AND THE "WAY FORWARD" AT FORD MOTOR COMPANY (R)

Acceleration of the "Way Forward" plan to turnaround Ford Motor Company is hardly a secret. But the numbers and details are staggering.

-- One-Third of the North American Salaried workforce slashed.

-- Buyout offers to FoMoCo’s entire hourly workforce.

– Six top executives rumored to be out.

-- A Twenty-Six percent reduction in manufacturing capacity.

-- Plants "idled" (in other words likely lost forever) in Maumee, Ohio; Essex, Ontario; Nofolk, Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; "Twin Cities," Minnesota; Wixom, Michigan; Windsor; Batavia and all the old Visteon parts plants now held by FoMoCo’s Automotive Components Holdings.

And buried deep within the press release (http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060915/FREE/60915003/1111&refsect=&template=printart) is a goal to find profitability at only a FOURTEEN to FIFTEEN PERCENT SHARE OF THE U.S. AUTOMOBILE MARKET!

The contrasts between now and those days long ago when thousands stormed the Highland Park Model T plant in search of Henry Ford’s Five-Dollars-a-day wage couldn't be more stark!

Sure, there are a few nuggets among the rubble. Lincoln Town Car will live a while longer, built along side its Panther cousins on a single shift at St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada (although FoMoCo will probably continue to starve it as a way to boost the new Lincoln "flagship"–the repackaged Volvo built in Chicago to be known as "MKS" (a/k/a the "MistaKeS")). A third shift will be added to William Clay Ford, Jr.’s environmentalist "dream" plant at the River Rouge complex in Dearborn. FoMoCo will tap some "B" and "C" class platforms not currently offered in North America.

But when the details are stripped away to the plan's essence, the accelerated Way Forward amounts to amputating the one-quarter to one-third of FoMoCo no longer seen as meaningful or necessary. If the "Ford Family" analogy has any basis in fact, then this plan is simply a grand divorce . . . a disinheritance for many of those who invested their lives into the Ford Motor Company.

For some, perhaps it’s a dramatic moment of choice– a bit like the apocryphal legend of Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis drawing a line in the sand at the Alamo. Those who accept the "Way Out" instead of staying to fight, and perhaps to "die" with FoMoCo, are the ones who lack the youth, vision and commitment to trust in the "Way Forward." They are the ones who would rather stay in their dying communities rather than move where the jobs are. They are the ones who see a quick opportunity to "cash out" and move on. "We don’t need them anyway!"

But the reality isn’t that simple.

Not everyone who eases out the door forever will actually have been dead weight. Not every voluntary reduction will create a net improvement to the institutional vision of FoMoCo. Not everyone who will be shown out, should be. And not everyone who should be shown out, will be. Such is the imprecision of self-selection, augmented by the monetary temptation of an incentive package.

Still, it all boils down to paying for idleness: "idling" resources and paying people for not working.

The idea of paying people for not working is a relatively new one in the arc of human history. Much of the great literature of the World and sacred teaching cautions against such idleness. It dulls the mind and rots the body. It wastes time and produces no benefits for the community. It’s a drag on progress and an empty consumption of resources.

While some of the 14,000 salaried and thousands of hourly workers divorced from FoMoCo will use their "road stakes" to start new lives, many others will sink into non-productive cycles of decline. Stripped of their lives’s work and declared surplus, these former employees will escape this failure any way they can . . . spending hours drinking and remembering former glories . . . wandering about franchised America in a recreational vehicle . . . "puttering" around the house. Many won’t even realize the utter folly of this, believing that they are "happier" now that FoMoCo is in their rear-view mirrors.

And others will list about in the post-industrial age, hopping from low-wage service job to service job, never fully recovering the vocational power of contributing to a legendary Fortune 5 enterprise. Some will grasp at dreams for independent small ventures or even new professional careers, subconsciously realizing that the entrepreneurial era of Henry Ford has forever been replaced by the domination of multinational corporations, except at the fringes of our technological world, and that they will never have the opportunity to be part of an automaking enterprise again.

A rare number may jump sides, taking up with the Japanese invaders or the Germans or even the Chinese. Life for them will then become the struggle of a spurned confidant, obsessed with "beating Ford" instead of nurturing it.

Perhaps a few of the divorced will wonder about what might have been. Some of them will never be able to shake the sadness of what we’ve lost as a company, an industry and as a nation. Some of them will comfort themselves with endless theories as to where FoMoCo’s wheels fell off and how they would have fixed it. Yet the irony is that in a massive, complex organization, most of these discarded employees never had sufficient influence to make much of a difference anyway. However, to the extent the self-reflective come to understand how they may have personally slacked off, gamed the system or asked for more than a reasonable share of the bounty, they will personalize FoMoCo’s failure as a failure of their own.

The "Way Forward" is an amputation attempting to solve a malady wrought from the proverbial "thousand cuts." For all the analytical pontificating, it’s hard to identify exactly when FoMoCo had the last clear chance to avoid this moment. The truth is that this day is the aggregation of many bad days, wherein many wrong decisions altered the course of FoMoCo and its competitors.

Would things have been different if William Clay Ford, Jr. had not assumed too much responsibility? Or if Bridgestone’s tire defects hadn’t lead to all those lawsuits? Or if Jac Nassar or Red Poling hadn’t risen to the top? Or if the 1996 Taurus had carried through the sales momentum the 1980s? Or if FoMoCo would have taken decisive action to stop the loss of share in the automobile market a decade ago? Or if FoMoCo hadn’t wasted energy and focus trying to diversify with the Premium Auto Group? Or if the SN-95 Mustang hasn’t been delayed so long? Or if FoMoCo had stayed aggressive in expanding market share back when it was the envy of Detroit, if not the whole automotive world in the mid to late 1980s?

Some will look back even further. Was the unforeseen turning point when Henry Ford, at the top of the automotive universe, failed to see the wisdom in William C. Durant’s market segmentation idea? Or when Henry failed to recognize the genius in the FoMoCo alumni who went on to populate the top ranks of nearly every U.S. automaker? Or when Old Henry didn’t fight back enough against General Motors gaining hegemony? Or when he didn’t unfetter Edsel Ford’s aesthetic and creative vision? Or when he allowed labor relations to sour into confrontation, violence and a permanent "management versus hourly worker" contest? Or when he hung on too long to his power and his obsolete ideas, such as mechanical brakes, beam front axles and transverse "buggy" springs?

Could it have been when the U.S. automakers didn’t demand the economic spoils of World War II and went along with protectionist practices in Japan and Germany? Could it have been when they didn’t take the import threat seriously? Or when they didn’t force the U.S. steel industry to modernize and cut costs? Or kept agreeing to unsustainable health care and "legacy" costs in successive UAW agreements? Or when they failed to provide a sufficient variety of quality subcompact models to stem the Japanese invasion? Or when they stopped aggressively developing new suspension and engine technology in the 1950s, conceding the technological headlines to the Germans and later, the Japanese? Or when they allowed billions in unfunded mandates to be slapped upon them through the Muskie Clean Air Act, safety regulations, and products liability litigation? Or when they didn’t respond aggressively enough to the first or second Middle Eastern Oil embargos? Or when they failed to develop workable responses to the propaganda of the "consumer" movement?

Although the pundits, the academics and the analysts will fell a forest of trees in publication of their respective theories as to the "causes" of FoMoCo’s fall from the top to a marginal Fourteen percent (or less) player in the Automotive market, we cannot know exactly when the downward arc began. We cannot determine with scientific certainty exactly how we let the Japanese and the Germans accomplish without a single shot what their mighty air and sea armadas of six decades ago could not.

What we do know is that probably thousands of cuts have now lead to a GIANT ONE of a different kind. And that idleness, while it may be necessary to save FoMoCo now, is a great waste of human potential in the long run.