Autos: In Quest of a Company That Needs Better Ideas

Ever since last February, when Henry Ford II landed G.M.’s Semon E. Knudsen as his company’s new president, Detroit has fairly rumbled with rumors of other changes at Ford. Few were surprised last month when ex-President Arjay Miller, who had been moved sidewise to make way for Knudsen, announced plans to move west to head Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Now a second exit has caught the motor city off guard. Last week Ford announced the resignation of one of the industry’s brightest executives: Donald N. Frey, 45, a prime mover of one of history’s most successful cars, the Mustang.

It was Don Frey (pronounced fry) who in January 1961, soon after he was made Ford’s product-planning manager, put designers to work on a sporty little car. Frey and his old mentor Lee Iacocca (TIME Cover, April 17, 1964) saw the Mustang into production two years before Chevrolet could react. For his work, Frey was well rewarded: in 1965 he became head of the Ford division. Last year he moved up to a six-figure-a-year vice-presidency in charge of product development.

Frey decided a month ago that he would leave Ford. He knew that Ford’s presidency would not likely be open again until 1978, when Knudsen turns 65. Even then, the man next in line is Lee Iacocca, currently Ford’s third-ranking executive and, at 43, a year and a half younger than Frey.

Most important, Frey was beginning to find that in the upper ranks of an increasingly centralized management, corporate life did not have quite the kick he found when he was running the Ford division more or less singlehanded. Something of a Medici of management, Frey reads Russian and French as well as Ward’s Automotive Reports, used to revel in running all phases of sales, down to seeing that such personal notions as stereo-tape systems and two-way station wagon doors were included among the “better ideas”—as the slogan calls them—in his cars.

So last week after Frey told Ford and Knudsen of his plans, he quietly flew off to Manhattan for a string of job interviews. Not that he is really pounding the pavements. Prey’s requirements: chief operating officer of a medium-sized company, preferably grounded in technology and involved in the design, manufacture and sale of a product—and, presumably, in need of a few better ideas.