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Lee Iacocca never wavered from early youth in his desire to go into the auto business—with Ford. For him, it was something like wanting to join the priesthood. "I suppose it was partly because my father had always been greatly interested in automobiles," he says, "and because I was influenced by family friends who were Ford dealers." Always a top student, he was felled by a seven-month bout with rheumatic fever as he entered high school, began to study even harder when he was forced to give up sports. To let off some of his competitive energy, he turned to the debating team, later perfected that talent with Dale Carnegie, is today an articulate public speaker.
With his eye still on Ford, he got a degree in industrial engineering from Lehigh University, won a fellowship to Princeton, where he got a master's in mechanical engineering, eventually breezed through Ford's 18-month training course in nine months. Assigned to a job as an automatic-transmission engineer, he shocked his superiors by turning it down, asked for a job in sales. "I learned at Princeton," says Iacocca, "that pure research did not fascinate me. I wanted to get into the people side of the business."
The Black Notebook. When no one at Ford headquarters in Dearborn would take him on as a salesman, he quit the company, went out on his own and got a job in the sales office of the Ford assembly plant in Chester, Pa. Impressed by the way the aggressive Iacocca whipped lagging Ford dealerships to higher sales, his boss (Charles Beacham, now Ford's marketing vice president) took him along when he progressed to sales manager of a region stretching from Pennsylvania to Florida.
Iacocca was assistant district manager in Philadelphia by 1956, when car sales began to slump after the 1955 boom. To stimulate business, he dressed up some cars with extra chrome and advertised "$56 a month for the '56 Ford." Sales jumped in Philadelphia, and a fellow by the name of Robert McNamara, then Ford Division general manager, picked up the "lacocca Plan" for the entire U.S. The plan got credit for selling 72,000 extra 1956 Fords, and before the year was out McNamara had brought lacocca into Detroit to become manager of Ford truck marketing.
Predictably, truck sales climbed to records under Iacocca's accelerator, and he soon moved on to become the car marketing manager for the Ford Division. One promotion followed another—until the telephone rang one November morning in 1960. It was Henry Ford II, and he wanted Iacocca to drop over. Less than an hour later,Iacocca drove back to division headquarters as its new boss.