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As president, Fields shuttered a factory in Mazda's hometown of Hiroshima, slashed the white-collar payroll by 20% and tied bonuses for directors and middle managers to year-end targets. To improve Mazda's balance sheet, he wrote off a $1.3 billion pension liability. And he had all salaried workers attend a two-day off-site, at which they were told that "Mazda must change or die." Says Katsumi Yoshitake, a 10-year veteran: "We knew we were in bad shape, but it seemed abstract." At the off-site, "a lot of it was bad news, but it made us feel truly part of the team." To keep up morale, Fields instituted flexible hours, on-site day care and time off to care for a family member. Once a month he would have lunch with plant workers to solicit suggestions for improvements.
Mazda squeaked out an operating profit as a result of such changes. But its real test is just starting. The firm's turnaround was based on cost cutting and boosted by a weak yen, which makes Mazda's vehicles cheaper abroad. The key to long-term growth is hot new models, but under Fields' regime, Mazda delayed new rollouts, concentrating instead on bolstering existing brands with better marketing and dealer support. "We were chasing Toyota and ended up with cars that didn't have personality," Fields says. In the coming months, Mazda will phase out two models and introduce three new ones, and how those vehicles fare will determine his longer-term legacy.
At PAG, Fields faces challenges that he never had at Mazda. He is taking over from the veteran Wolfgang Reitzle, a former BMW honcho respected for his product-development and engineering acumen. Analysts say Jaguar would not be in the black without Reitzle's insistence that the automaker not skimp on such engineering details as the six-speed gearbox in the S-Type. Some Ford watchers, though, say Reitzle's departure was timely. "Wolfgang was great on the brand side, but he was always banging heads against people on the cost side of the business," says analyst Scott Hill of Sanford C. Bernstein.
Fields acknowledges that "I'm not an engineer," and says he expects to have "much more of a business influence than a product influence." Indeed, PAG's new design chief, Peter Horbury, will report not to Fields but to Ford's design guru J Mays. Fields is expected to jack up volume, which will mean pushing harder into the entry luxury market, as Jaguar is doing with its X-Type. And he will have to make more raids of the Ford parts bin. Ford has reportedly killed Jaguar's plan, championed by Reitzle, to develop a platform for its next generation of large sedans, and is instead considering one developed with Lincoln and Volvo. Land Rover may incorporate Jaguar's new V-8 engine in its SUVs. And Volvo is expected to share more subsystems and component sets with various Ford divisions.
The risk is that Ford could sully the cachet of its luxury vehicles. Says Prudential Securities analyst Michael Bruynesteyn: "If you leverage platforms and components, it has to be done in a way consumers don't notice." Already purists sniff that Jaguar's S-Type shares so many parts with the Lincoln LS and Ford Thunderbird that it is a Ford alley cat in a Jaguar's skin.