Ford Fires Its CEO, and the Blue Oval Turns Its Hopeful Eyes To... Jim Hackett
The dismissal of a CEO of a company as important to Michigan as Ford is a pretty big deal anyway. So a post about Ford firing Mark Fields amidst declining stock price and market share, after a mere three years at the helm, would probably warrant an OT post here.
But, hey, look who putting his cape back on and moving into the office: Jim Hackett.
A college football program might seem like peanuts to a multi-billion dollar corp, and the article only mentions his role here in passing, but let's face it: Hard to believe Hackett's exemplary performance revitalizing Michigan athletics wasn't something that helped show the board that he may be a guy that "gets it."
Some of the reasons for holdouts are:
A: Time to redesign and test all forms to swap to another type of printer
B: They may use carbon forms for signatures then scan them in(Yes O'Reilly's should have signature capture devices).
C: Some really old ERP systems aren't super compatible with newer printers.
D: The time involved, most companies on ancient ERP's and printers are there because they don't have the IT budget involved.
E: They actually are making the swap over this year. Even printing multiple copies and having someone sign something on regular paper twice is cheaper. Yes capture through tech can be done but once again, comes down to time and money and may not be very feasible depending on what old infrastructure is still being ran.
Also those old mainframe based systems actually usually load and navigate significantly quicker than the newer ones.
Dear God... the faxes....
The people saying self-driving cars will be mainstream in five years are the Silicon Valley bubble elites. They're also the ones who ignore facts like Apple saying "uh, wow, cars are actually really hard."
They're coming. They're not coming anywhere near that fast.
They are also finding that automotive production on a scale to matter is really, really hard. Just ask Tesla. They have 400K people ready to give them money for the Model 3. The problem is that making 400K cars is significantly harder than making 50K.
This is more of an issue with networked cars. It only really works if everyone is on the network and your car can talk to mine. If I am out there in a ten year old car, I screw everyone up because my car won't tell yours want I am going to do next. So the self-drivers have to get ramped up to huge production, at low cost, and get everyone to buy one, all at the same time.
Good luck with that!
Consider the comparison to cell phones, which I think is very useful. We're at about 75% market penetration with smartphones, 10 years after their introduction. This is a device that costs 1/100th of the price of a car if you buy it new, and which people keep about 1/5th as long, and which doesn't have a tremendously robust used market in competition with the new market. In fact, it's possible to get them "free." And with all that, there are still tens of millions of people out there in this country without a smartphone.
Given that, how long would it take the private ownership market to adopt self-driving cars? Decades, clearly. Oh, and to take full advantage of networked AVs, the infrastructure needs to be onboard. Traffic light timing; Waze-style notifications to the car to avoid traffic, construction, and crashes; speed limit modifications, etc. Otherwise all you really get is one car at a 4-way stop telling the other "I was here first." That means the whole road network has to be upgraded too. Good luck with that as well.
And all you need at that stop light is one yahoo like me who wants to drive himself to go, "Well screw it, I'm going" and the whole efficient, self-driving thing is shot to hell.
Bottom line - this ain't gonig to happen.
What I'm surprised that by hal way down this thread is that no one has even mentioned the security risk that connected autonomous cars represent.
The world has seen a rash of vehicles used to commit mass murder by plowing into large crowds. We have also witnessed governments (primarily the US) possess technological tools to corrupt various computer networks and malicious code developed to take over physical systems (Stuxnet).
It would only be a matter of time before some entity had the ability to remotely control a meaningful percentage of the vehicles of a given operating system.
Insurance isn't the real issue -- that's just tort attorneys trying to chase a few bucks that could be solved with federal legislation on how to handle the situation.
that scares the $hit out of me. If a virus hits 2-3% of a completely autonomous LA then all heck breaks loose.
What if you have a virus that is just able to lockdown a car at minimum? Accelerate the vehicle unless the driver instantly authorizes some type of money transfer? Assumes control of a hazardous container shipment?
When talking about autonomous vehicles, this really isn't an 'if' but a 'when' and how widespread is the damage. This - in my mind - will be the biggest hurdle for autonomous or network-controlled vehicles
He's calling it the CAR-baugh
However my thought was that the Harbaugh would be an elite model to navigate the roads as fast as possible, enthusiastically, maybe randomly honking the horn.
However this scares me because like net neutrality rulings where the internet will likely slowly be partioned off to only load what "they" want you to be viewing. Highways will likely be the same. You can have the standard driverless model for $300/mo or the enhanced $600 model which is luxury and gets first priority in traffic situations. Then for hourly minimum wage workers it'll be $150 a month but they will get get lowest priority. They'll then get to work late and get fired and live in constant misery.
I then forsee my cheapass waiting 10 minutes to merge until I come across another economy class driverless car. Until I pony up for Standard or Driverless Prime, which will be Amazon's which will say screw the roadways and just fly or carry you in a bubble using drones which work together.
Was hard for me to keep from being political on this one.
I believe Mr. Hackett was previously involved with a Ford subsidiary in the autonomous driving sector, Ford Mobility, so not that surprising.
for the past 14 months or so.
Until they sold all their branches in my state to Great Southern bank, the switchover was a massive PITA. They did what they could essentially had a few weeks where I couldn't bank at all as they just pointed the finger at each other.
Great Southern isn't bad just behind in technology(I mean "Southern" right?), for example their app will never recognize a check whereas 5/3's had auto-focus and only took the picture once it could read all info. So I just never deposited the $3 IRS refund check I got. Not really worth my time and gas to drive across town to deposit in person.
I wish there was a gif with Jim Hackett's face photoshoped over Kevin Bacon's face in that scene in Footloose where Kevin Bacons character is playing a game of tractor chicken with the high school douchebag (which would be Dave Brandon) and wins.
What about Warde's actions has amde you form that assumption?
So your argument is that Warde Manuel should have, in his first months in the chair, fired a legendary coach who just won a conference tournament and made it to the quarterfinals of the NCAA hockey tournament, having recruited a player that should have won the Hobey Baker award?
That is absolutely absurd.
And, wow, a lacrosse program that has never achieved anything ever in its short lifespan has achieved a bit and he decided to fire the coach after a year. Break out the pitchforks.
You've been around too long and been too involved to be a troll, but your arguments here are indistinguishable from those that a troll would make. C'mon, you're better than this.
I seem to remember quite a few threads where Warde got blasted for some of the actions he took. I can't place them off the top of my head but maybe about the scheduling of MSU/OSU?
But unless we threaten to leave the B1G, I don't know what a new AD is going to do in that situation. The die was cast under Brandon's reign of terror. But yeah, there were people who thought Warde should've fired Red last Spring. What I find funny is that some of the same people that said Warde should've fired Red last year are the same ones who said in November that Beilein should be able to coach until he wants to retire. Only one of those guys won a national title.
Yeah Warde's been bad because... why? There've been maybe a half-dozen different complaints against him, most of which have been thoroughly debunked. Hockey coaching issue? Red has retired and Mel is in. Fire Beilein? Wait, maybe he's not as bad as we thought. Game time in the B1G basketball tournament after the plane crash? Team wanted it that way, and I guess they were right because they won the whole thing. Night games? As many as Harbaugh wanted last year; this year they are out of his hands, so they knew there would be more coming.
There's no smoke and there's no fire. He's doing his job, which is mostly behind-the-scenes stuff. And if people want to give him flak for things that are not his fault, maybe they should give him credit for how smoothly events like the incredible Italy trip went, something his department has to plan and manage and something that went so well even SEC haters were drooling in awe of it.
And apologies as I had confused you with freejs, so forget the Ollie point.
That being said, your complaints about Manual are still tired and stupid as hell.
That's not even remotely close to what he said. You're making yourself look very, very foolish.
Hackett had been working for Ford since about the time he left UM, dude.
That's all.
To be fair, this came across my radar because Angelique Chengelis, of the Detroit News, retweeted the article.
he can convince the Fords to sell the team or that his contract indicates he will split time between Ford and improving the Lions.
Lions are peanuts compared to this.
This maybe a seminal moment for FoMoCo. Stock has lost more than 30% in market capitalization in the midst of a multi-year rebound in the North American auto market. Ford is weak in China, the 2nd largest global market. Ford lags in eletric car offerings, which has propelled Tesla to a greater market cap than either Ford or GM.
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IIRC, it was a tough decision for him and his wife to have him leave retirement just to run Michigan's AD which is tiny in comparison to Ford. I guess I see now he was already running a Ford business, but running a segment of the company is a lot different than running the whole show.
Given that he has though, I'm thinking I should acquire some Ford stock...
Actually they are so strong, that the big 3 as we know it (even in the form of today) won't be here in 10 years.
Not sure if it is a long term solution unless Jim has figured out a way of eating into GM's sales.
its manipulation by the Ford Family. They control ~40% of the voting power within the company. I don't think they are actively on the payroll, rather get paid via increasing stock valuation and whatever dividend Ford pays out.
You have to look back a few years but also imo the reason Ford took no government bailout was that those cherished Class B stocks would have all gone into the fire and from their perspective they were probably correct to try to spur the company on via other means (financing, etc).
The auto business is a difficult thing. The Tesla market cap news is just a media bubble, again imo. They already face the same (or worse!) cash flow problems that the other major players experience with fewer product lines to support them.
Hackett seems to possess immeasurable diplomacy and political savvy. I think that might be exactly what is needed over there to calm the waters and possibly refocus the business.
The auto business has become so "managerial" over basically 100 years and now it must attempt to return to "entrepreneurial" to open new ground and it definitely takes a person with a different mindset that's unlike 95% of the management in place.
Enough technobiz babble...In Hackett We Trust. 8-)
because they had secured loans from the banks just before the mortage crisis hit. They didn't need bailouts by shear luck of timing.