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Corporate cultures are notoriously change resistant, and this is not just any corporation. The company ethos is steeped in the history of the Ford family. Henry was a compulsive innovator, although not a particularly good manager. Bill inherited the independent mind and high expectations of his great-grandfather. As a student at Princeton, he wrote a senior thesis titled "Henry Ford and Labor: A Reappraisal." Today the culture needs a lot more of its founder's inexhaustible curiosity than it does its later devotion to spreadsheets. "Bill is the first Ford since Henry Ford to have the ability to operate mentally with no boxes," says Douglas Brinkley, a historian who wrote Wheels for the World, about Ford Motor. "He is wide open to possibilities, and that's the same way Henry was."
To get a sense of how plodding Ford Motor can be, talk to Vance Zanardelli, whose windowless office is tucked away in the Research and Innovation Center. Zanardelli, who is working on cutting-edge hydrogen research, has experienced firsthand Ford's roadblocks--and how the new leadership is trying to remove them. When his team unveiled the prototype it had developed for a hydrogen-powered internal-combustion car to top Ford executives in 2001, "Bill just loved it," Zanardelli says. "Everyone else raised all the reasons it wouldn't work." Despite the boss's enthusiasm, Zanardelli ran into budgetary problems and decided to go around the bureaucrats standing in the way. When he got an unexpected call from the human-resources department, he figured he was going to be fired for insurrection. Instead, Joe Laymon, group vice president of human resources, urged him to "be bold and do the right thing"--encouraging his maverick behavior. "There was a fear of failure," says Laymon, of the cultural legacy. "We need to instill in people that it's O.K. to fall off the bike."
Coming up with exciting designs will be crucial to Ford's success. Until recently, with the exception of a new Mustang, an instant hit, Ford has failed to produce cars that have energized the market. Peter Horbury, the company's director of design and Volvo's former design chief, whom Ford brought to Detroit in 2004, was stunned by Ford Motor's rulebound ways. "I told the designers to just get on with what they were doing," he says, "and they looked at me terrified, like, What does that mean?" The designers were so used to following orders that Horbury needed first to develop with them a basic company design language before encouraging them to use it to become more innovative. "I think we're getting it now," says Horbury. As an example of the new thinking, he points to the Fusion, a sporty, affordable midsize sedan that Ford hopes will compete with the Toyota Camry, a perennial top seller that also boasts a new design.