The Rebel Driving Ford

William Clay Ford Jr. knows it would have been easier to take the money and run. He's a fourth-generation favored son of America's first industrial family, a clan so ludicrously wealthy the members have their own accounting firm to manage their allowances. Life could easily have been a dividend-enriched affair of multiple parties, multiple mansions and multiple marriages, the big challenges being to avoid alcoholism and choose the right charity boards.

Instead, Bill Ford insisted on having a career at the family shop, Ford Motor Co., which is far more complicated than you would think. Any number of times since the 1920s, the carmaker's professional managers have had to take the keys away from actual Fords before they did irreparable harm to the business. Ford, 44, became chairman in 1999 only after parrying the objection of his predecessor Alex Trotman, who didn't care to see another Ford in the driver's seat--particularly this one. "I was a heretic," Ford admits. "There were a lot of people saying, 'Let's hope he doesn't get too close to the real business.'"

Too late. Having grabbed the wheel, Ford the rich kid is driving Ford Motor down a radical path. A fiercely principled environmentalist and congenial company man, Ford is fomenting a revolution to transform the family firm--now a worldwide industrial monster with $170 billion in annual sales--into a corporation that cares as much for consumers and the air they breathe as it does for its bottom line. And he's doing it at a time when Ford Motor's image is suffering from allegations that its Explorer models had design flaws that contributed to the failure of their Firestone tires, which have been implicated in 174 road deaths.

Ford believes that by reconfiguring Ford Motor, he has a shot at rearranging the entire 21st century industrial landscape. "We have the ability to transform a great old-line company into a vital, global model of sustainable manufacturing," he said recently in his office, gazing over the sprawling River Rouge factory complex that his great-grandfather Henry established in 1917. "But we're on a continuum, and I don't know if we ever declare victory."

In a sense, what Ford proposes is Ford Motor's second revolution. Some of his ideals are eerily similar to those of his great-grandfather, an environmentalist and pre-eminent bird watcher who pioneered the assembly line, the service station and, above all, the then heretical notion of a working wage. (And yes, the founder was also an anti-Semite and a union-busting tyrant who spied on his workers.) Henry Ford reinvented manufacturing and changed the world. Bill Ford wants to go Henry one better by embracing the notion of sustainability, or the idea that you can make things without damaging people and planets. In Ford's case, this means creating worker-friendly, environmentally pure factories that make emissions-free cars. He hopes to kill off the carbon monoxide-spewing internal-combustion engine by the end of his reign.

"Bill family values," as they are called derisively by his detractors, don't absolve the company of decades of enthusiastic polluting, during which Ford Motor's top executives fought environmental regulators every step of the way. And Ford has been called a hypocrite for having benefited from this corporate behavior.

Yet the notion of the sustainable corporation is getting traction in the most unlikely places. Just three years ago, companies like Ford were members of the Global Climate Coalition, a U.S. business lobby that claimed the global-warming threat (and the Kyoto accord) was nonsense. On the heels of BPAmoco, Ford abandoned the coalition in 1999, and so have the likes of General Motors and DaimlerChrysler. Once renowned polluters like chemical giants Dupont and Dow are spending heavily on "green" solutions to business.

Ford is well aware that there is precious little hard evidence to date that being green brings in greenbacks. And sustainability will absolutely require profitability. "Can we do this and make money? We have to," challenges Ford. "Has it ever been done? No. But it hasn't been tried either."

Ford has two valuable assets in his quest to change history. One is that his name is on the door: his family supports him, and they still own 40% of the company's Class B voting stock. Last year the family got $150.5 million in dividends--a number that stays constant no matter where the share price is. No cranky cousins or siblings are going to fire Bill.

The second is that this board chairman doesn't actually run the company; he lets the hired help do that, although that's probably not how CEO Jacques Nasser views himself. When the board appointed Bill, it promoted Jac (as he is known), considered to be the industry's top executive, and encouraged the two men to work out a power-sharing arrangement. Ford oversees the board and the long-term direction of the company; Nasser is the boss who makes the day-to-day decisions. Admits Ford: "My role here probably has no parallel anywhere."