Personnel
Diversity gives Ford a new look
Aggressive recruiting of minorities and women is sweeping away old guard
Promoting diversity
Jacques Nasser has led a push within Ford Motor Co. to hire and promote minorities and women. Here are some examples:
Frank Taylor
V.P.,
material planning and
logistics. Joined Ford in 1998 from GM.
Kathleen Lickogi
President and CEO, Ford of Mexico.
Joined Ford in 1998 from United Technologies Corp.
Elliot Hall
V.P., dealer development
Hall, a 13-year Ford veteran, is leading an enhanced minority dealer recruiting push.
Louise Goeser
V.P., quality. Joined Ford in March from Whirlpool Corp.
Joe Laymon
Executive director, human resources business operations. Joined Ford from Kodak in March.
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By Mark Truby / The Detroit News
DEARBORN — When Don Winkler became head of Ford Credit Co. last year, his boss — Ford chief executive officer Jacques Nasser — made it clear to him that his staff must be diverse.
That presented an immediate challenge to Winkler. Of his 16 direct charges, all were white and all but one were male.
Winkler began an all-out push for diversity, dispatching recruiters who specialize in finding female and minority management candidates.
“We went to headhunters who didn’t find us 51-year-old white males,” said Winkler, himself a 52-year-old white male. “The first white male they bring in you say, ‘Excuse me, you didn’t hear what I am saying.’ ”
Seven months later, Winkler’s top staff includes four women and one black.
As for the white males they replaced: “Some people had to take packages and go,” he said.
Such scenarios are playing out all over Ford, where Nasser has made diversity a top priority. Nasser recently asked his top 300 managers to outline a plan to increase the diversity in their organization. Part of their bonuses hinge on how well they accomplish these goals.
The quest for diversity at Ford goes beyond race and gender and includes nationality. Ford’s top layer of management, in particular, is filled by executives from a hodgepodge of countries including Australia, Great Britain and Germany.
Ford’s effort is beginning to draw notice. Fortune magazine in its July issue rated Ford the country’s 30th best company for minorities. No other automaker made the top 50. In 1999, Ford made 30 percent of its new hires minorities and raised the percentage of minority managers to 15 percent.
Nasser is not satisfied.
“We do very well in terms of national diversity,” Nasser said. “We don’t do as well with females or African Americans or Hispanics, or Asians for that matter. We have made great progress from a poor base and that’s one of the opportunities out there in front of us.”
The push for diversity coupled with Nasser’s goal of filling at least 20 percent of open management positions with outsiders has left many Ford veterans feeling left behind.
David Murphy, Ford’s human resources vice-president, says he, Nasser and Ford Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. receive e-mail and letters from many employees who feel cheated.
“It’s inevitable that some people are going to feel like the rules have changed and in many ways they have,” Nasser said. “The alternative for companies such as Ford is to lag behind and be part of the stodgy old companies or forge ahead into the new century as a leading company.”
Kevin Ford, a 42-year-old African American, was promoted late last year to an assistant area manager at Ford’s Woodhaven stamping plant.
“I am not sure how much my race had to do with my promotion. I hope that more of it was based on the things that I have done, my education,” said Ford, who has a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
Though he hasn’t sensed resentment toward him, Ford said “there is a lot of concern that we are not selecting people for positions the same way we used to.”
Perhaps because diversity can be such a polarizing issue, Nasser opens up in internal meetings on diversity, relating personal stories from his childhood to illustrate the importance of providing equal opportunity and accepting all cultures.
“He will talk about what it felt like to be a Lebanese boy growing up in white Australia,” Murphy said. “He talks about bringing Lebanese food to school and being laughed at because he had the strange stuff.”
Along with doing the right thing, Ford believes it is making smart business decisions.
In an effort to tap into primarily black, Hispanic and Asian markets Ford is recruiting and training minority dealers. Under the program, the candidates complete two years of business classes and Ford helps finance the dealership.
“The business reasons are monumental,” said Elliot Hall, Ford vice-president of dealer development. “We need to attract minorities into our showrooms.”
Ford, like many other companies, view building a reputation as an inclusive, multicultural company as an advantage when competing for increasingly scarce talent. Nasser, for example, moved Lincoln-Mercury to California to give the division exposure to a new pool of employees and a different culture.
The automotive business has become a global and multinational industry and companies such as Ford need employees who understand the world outside Detroit.
Nasser is a prime example. He worked on five continents in his Ford career and speaks four languages.
His mission is to meld Ford — which includes British marques Jaguar and Aston Martin, Volvo of Sweden, Mazda of Japan — into a cohesive organization. The dynamic could become still more complex. Ford was chosen as the preferred bidder for Daewoo, the struggling Korean auto firm currently up for sale.
The importance of blending cultures is reinforced daily at Ford by the resumes that stream in from Auburn Hills-based DaimlerChysler AG workers unhappy with their place in the German-controlled company.
Resumes travel the other way, too. Ironically, the push for inclusiveness has some feeling forgotten.
“We are in the middle of transforming one of the biggest companies in the world,” Murphy said. “You aren’t going to do that by pleasing everybody, by having some kind of consensus. We know we are going to upset some people. Maybe they shouldn’t be a part of Ford Motor Co.”
