Alan Mulally was the most feared outsider in Detroit-until Cerberus came along. Its deal puts even more pressure on his drive to transform Ford's dysfunctional corporate culture.On a chilly morning in February, the new chief executive of Ford Motor Co. (F), Alan R. Mulally, boarded one of the company's Falcon twin-turbo jets and flew to Consumer Reports magazine's automobile testing facility in East Haddam, Conn. He was joined by two senior engineers. Their mission: to spend half a day with the publication's staff getting detailed evaluations of every model made by Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury.
It wasn't a fun trip, according to a source close to the company. At one point, the Consumer Reports team criticized the new Ford Edge crossover SUV for lacking an electric opener triggered by the key fob--or at least a handle on the rear hatch. Both are standard equipment on many of its rivals. A woman on the magazine's staff demonstrated how she, at five feet tall, struggled to open the rear of the SUV as she carried two bags of groceries. Had it been a rainy day, she would have had to set her purchases down on the wet pavement and then muscle up the hatch. Once she'd done that, she'd face another hurdle: She was too short to shut it.
After a couple of hours on the firing line, Ford's engineers got defensive. Interrupting the testers, they started airing their side of the story in front of the new boss. Sensing that the meeting was deteriorating, Mulally says he handed each one a pad and pen. "You know what? Let's just listen and take notes," he said. The episode was a perfect illustration of what Mulally considers one of Ford's major problems: the tendency of employees to rationalize mistakes instead of fixing them. "We seek to be understood more than we seek to understand," he observes.
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