Job One: A New CEO?

Dec. 21, 2004

Bill Ford is better at being chairman than chief executive, a CEO coach contends.

Tune out the earnest-appearing television commercials. Discount the abrupt dismissal of former CEO Jacques Nasser. Focus instead on temperament and desired results. And William Clay Ford Jr. is better suited to being chairman than CEO of Ford Motor Co., concludes Stephen Payne, founder and president of Leadership Strategies, a Princeton, N.J., firm that coaches CEOs and other senior executives. "This would be a great time for them to split the chairman and CEO roles, and put him back into chairman, and get someone in there [as CEO] that actually understands global competitive marketing and market positioning," says Payne, whose clients have included FMC Corp., Johnson & Johnson and General Motors Corp. "The times call for a CEO that is very clear on the new strategy, on how Ford is going to compete in the long run or in next five to 10 years in the automotive market," Payne emphasizes. "And my reading of Bill Ford is that is not him. He doesn't have the [operating] experience. He doesn't have the cutting kind of edge to him." If not Bill Ford, then whom? Someone like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the just-retired chairman of IBM Corp., suggests Payne. "When Gerstner moved into IBM from Nabisco, he was a man that was a real focused strategic thinker and a man that was really seriously into execution," he observes. Yet, unlike Gerstner, who moved from food to computers, from one industry to another, Payne believes a new Ford CEO must be an automotive executive. Perhaps, he speculates, the person is within Ford Europe or in a competitor such as DaimlerChrysler AG. Or "possibly" he is Carlos Ghosn, the president and CEO of Japan's Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., who has reinvigorated an automaker that was facing bankruptcy only a few years ago. "The automotive industry is an industry where your track record is very important, your image is very important-much more so than [in] food . . . and probably more so than [in] computing," stresses Payne.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.