ford motor

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Ford Motor | 2022 World's Most Admired Companies

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Ford Motor

Ford Motor | 2022 World's Most Admired Companies | Fortune

The Associated Press

Ford is recalling 1.5 million cars that are susceptible to leaky brake hoses and broken windshield wipers

/2023/03/17/ford-recall-cars-ford-fusion-lincoln-mkz-brake-hoses-windshield-wipers/

Ford recalls over 1.5 million vehicles to fix brakes, wipers

/2023/03/17/ford-recalls-over-1-5-million-vehicles-to-fix-brakes-wipers/

Christiaan Hetzner

Tesla’s Cybertruck could end up just being a ‘sideshow’ for the carmaker, warns Morgan Stanley

/2023/03/09/tesla-cybertruck-may-end-up-being-a-side-show-morgan-stanley-warns/

Ford is adding thousands of jobs to turbo-charge production as the auto industry rebounds: ‘The industry is on its track back’

/2023/03/03/ford-jobs-increase-car-production/

Jennifer Kolstad, Global Design Director, Ford Motor Company 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Workplace Reinvention: The New “Office”

Conferences

Brainstorm Design 2022 -  The New “Office”

we are going to start off with a delving into a pretty huge workplace experiment 100 years ago, the ford motor company's eponymous founder pioneered the five day workweek so that, that was kind of a paradigm until we got always on working and the pandemic just changed everybody's perception and desire about what we should do with the, with the workday. Um last month Ford brought in 25,000 people to embark on an ambitious hybrid work model, blending physical and remote arrangements In preparation. The company reimagined a third of its Michigan office spaces, turning some 3.35 million square feet into collaboration centers. We're going to get into what that means. A central goal is to promote interaction and collaboration of location. So the physical overhaul has been accompanied by rollout of virtual collaboration and digital productivity tools to discuss the thinking behind the project and how workplaces are likely to evolve in the future. We have joining us virtually. Please welcome Jennifer Kolstad, the global design Director, Ford Motor Company. Mm hmm. Hello, jennifer Hi, I am, I am I on screen And what you will now your on screen and you look great. And uh, I should, I should tell everybody that you were gonna be here with us today, but you ran into some nightmare flight cancelation challenges, but you're a trooper. So you're joining us virtually. Um and, and Maryland is joining us to virtually Maryland behind you. Oh, that's oh, she's here. Uh No, we're gonna do this hybrid style ford style. So maybe it worked out. That's right. It's thematically appropriate. So you joined ford in in 2019, I believe? Um you're the Global Design Director. I mean when I, when I hear Ford Global Design Director, I would normally, you know, I think a lot of people think cars, you designed cars, but that's not your background, your your background is in architecture and interior space design. So what was your mission coming in? What's your job as global design Director for? I wrote the role with Jim Hackett, who was the ceo of ford at the time. And um, the ask was really to find somebody who could come in and begin unifying all of our assets globally. And uh, just so you all understand the order of magnitude here, we have almost 200,000 people working for Ford around the world. And so inside of that portfolio, not only do we have industrial and workplace, but we also have hospitality hotels and the whole community districts like michigan central and Detroit, which is a revitalization project. So, and of course retail and, you know, for a long time, we hadn't, we had neglected constructing a red thread, which is really a brand language that would bring all of those assets together and to simply put that with the remit. So when you started that remit, that was ambitious, uh, rethinking everything, but then the whole world changed. Just a few months later, obviously you went through the lockdown the trauma that we all did? And then you had to start reimagining your reimagining. So what was that process like? You know and where was was there a definitive moment when you said okay we're gonna you know wipe off the chalk board and uh we're gonna rethink this you know how did that go? You hear people now saying that Covid was somewhat opportunistic and it was to be real because um you know in spite of the fact that everybody went home in a very untested environment you know we hadn't even tested our I. T. Capabilities and the the entire workforce went home on a friday and went back online on monday. Um we also had our new world headquarters which is the hub of Dearborn campus campus transformation kind of duel going up going up so still on the ground dirt, dug well through schematic design with our architects and then this Covid moment. So we paused the project and did a rethink which led us to a think tank that we called the future of work. But you know we had several projects around the world that we're running and we did exactly that. We just took a minute to catch our breath and deeply think through what the future of work might look like. Not for everybody for us. Yeah. And how did you do that rethink and what did you find and how did the you know what were the big signals that came through the noise of you know everyone's speculating about where this is going to go look, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of head nodding in the room right now. I can't see y'all, but let's see if this tracks with wherever you're from too. I mean, even today we would all say that we don't know what the answer is and what the outcome will be of our new policies. I mean we returned to work what April the third now and we're and we're, you know, looking at our centers and seeing what the metrics are telling us even over a couple of months, anticipating over that over the next 12 everything is going to shift and we'll probably reset again. But you know, at the beginning of this, um, you had to know that this was gonna, we were going into a whole phase of unknown and beta test and the way best to do that is, you know, essentially bring really smart people with you to construct a framework so that you can move through the unknown time frame thoughtfully And for us that was leading with human science first, that's kind of our default when we practice research like design, we just start to fill up with all of the human scientists and scientists necessary to help us think into the problem. And those would be folks like behavioral psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists like, you know, the people who will help you understand the human condition and what potentially might be an outcome. So I just want to remind everybody will have a chance for a couple of questions before the end. But um, so what did you what were the big takeaways from, you know, this discussion, this deep consideration of the human condition? What did you come back and say, okay, this is, you know, now this is how we're gonna these are fundamental principles for designing a flexible but future looking uh work environment. We tried to go a bit deeper than um actually the word flexibility is a great example because, you know, a lot of folks would have carried flexibility into um covid or into our think tank, but what we quickly learned that it's not flexibility and flexibility anymore. Now we're into kind of a state of systemic resiliency, which is more about anticipatory change. Like there's a nuanced shift to thinking through a new definition of the new parameters, flexibility. We can all anticipate and understand that we're potentially better for it. So it's not like it was radical shift, but it was more like shifter or clarifications. Like for example, we talked about wellness before. Now we're really in a state of health equity, which is health and wellness for all. So how do you take an idea like health equity? Um and build that into the work environment and connect that physical environment were the, you know, holistic working environment with behavioral applications. Well, if we just hang on wellness for a second. um, you know, for those of you in the room that our designers, architects and tourists, whatever else. You know, you're, you're familiar with. There are certification strategy like well, um, and that helps us along to a degree. But what we've learned is that um, you know, when you, when you come into a tough moment when we're starting to debate distribution of resources, you really start prioritizing something like health, health equity means that you get around it and you um, you protect it. So for example, in the hub, you know, which is, as I said, was going up and it's still under construction now because of Covid and our agreement that health equity is a priority when we have to shed some of the, you know, the design elements in the building. We now ford say, well this is important to us. We're going to keep the elements that promote healthy living, like, like great facade glazing, you know, that allows natural light to penetrate the depth of the floor plate or like our interior court era and the landscape that goes in them instead of giving that away, which would have been easy to do couple of years ago Now we're going to protect for that stuff. I just want to bring up, we have a few visuals. I just want to look at real quickly. Um, yeah, this is, we're seeing the outside of the hub. Maybe you could just tell us a little of the specifics about this, this massive building and and what's in it, you know, and then we have a couple more slides, which I think, you know about. So you were looking at a two million square foot new headquarters, which will be our new R and D center in dearborn michigan And day one, it's meant to house 6000 bums in seats. So a lot of people are coming together really for the first time ever because if you've been to um, ford campus, it's, it's pretty distributed. In other words, you got people and buildings all over the place and they've not really collaborated or worked side by side before this was really important to Jim Hackett when he kicked off the project before he left we hired a firm called Snohetta to design with us that's Craig Dikkers and his remarkable team and now a firm called I. B. I is taking it across the line, but you can see the glazing on the building in that image that you're looking at right now. And the fact that it's lifted off the ground and there's retail and food and beverage and a bunch of sort of public amenities filling the space as well. I'm trying to, yeah, there's another image of the outside of the hub. Um, and then we have a few images of the experience center. Could you just tell us quickly, uh, what the essence of the experience center is like the experience center is actually, it's just finished, it opened january and that's like our think of it as our pilot to the hub, it really is a co lab center, so we've tested some ideas, some, some were designed for a couple of years ago and some precipitated as a result of covid like placement of technology and the fact that we have a lot of folks participating uh you know like I am right now coming in from other locations like Chennai or san paolo or wherever and so that really had us go back and reevaluate our technology package, but um this is our experience center and um it's you know, it's designed for our dealers for learning and development for our external customers and if you come to Dearborn please come by and have a look, so if you have a question, stick your hand up and we'll get a mic to you, um we have mike handlers in the room um but jennifer, I want to ask you, so you you mentioned getting people back in in april and starting to implement this and you know, see the results in real time and interactions. So first of all, how did you uh communicate? Uh you know, we're coming back into this new space and then what are you starting to see early on as people are beginning to experience it. Um This was an immense communication effort, let me tell you and a lot of teaching about um what I mean, starting with what is collaboration? Um how to balance your time, How to work with your people leader? I mean some people I learned I didn't appreciate really needs some um structure to their day, you know, to understand what focused time is versus collaborative time and how to use their buildings. And so we took the better part of a year teaching that out globally and now we're going to really see the fruits of that labor. We're seeing already that the collaboration centers are being used. But you know, let's say a week ago the CDC recommended masks go back on, we did that and statistically uh you know, the population of our centers declined immediately. And that's not a bad thing. It means that people are making the choices needed to uh you know, to be comfortable and safe themselves and to work in a in a way that's most productive for them. You can tell people don't like working with maths on, so they're staying home. So uh my understanding is that a huge portion of this space, the new space you've designed like 75% is common collaborative space. Um You know, we all have like a lot of debate about kind of uh you know, shared office space before the pandemic. Then it all took on a new meaning. So what do you what do you what kind of feedback are you getting in terms of different groups of employees? Is there a generational divide? Uh is there one group of people who like this more and and how do you measure as you go forward? The productivity, is it more productive in this environment than you know, the old environment? Um It's difficult for me to answer that question directly because we have so many skilled teams and so many people, it's gonna take a while for us to gather the data for me to be able to give you that answer. But what you're asking about really is a demographic and psychographic analysis um and how people are responding to their environment. Um I think this will end up being more skilled team based for example, like ford credit has typically had more about, you know, quiet focused office type space. But then we have other skilled teams who have always worked in open studio format. And so I think what we're going to see is some clashing between our skilled teams. So I mean this is going on at the same time that Ford Motor itself is going through this massive transformation of, you know, splitting the company into two divisions, the the forward looking electric vehicle, you know, business and and sort of the legacy uh car and truck company. How did you weave that into what you're doing? Is that, is, do you make a distinction between the businesses or do you, you know, put everybody in together for the moment together because our collapse centers are meant to just be kind of like taken on and used and abused by skilled teams, Like I'm like, I'm describing to you, but you know, if model e needs to have run a design sprint, which they did a week ago um, as a group, they'll claim a space like a lot of space and then take it for, you know, a few weeks to run their sprint and then they'll kind of disperse again and then another team will come in and use it and that's how it's meant to be used. So it's not assigned necessarily, but you know, it can be taken and really, um, you know, worked in for a duration. Great, well, there's a lot of exciting things happening in Dearborn. Um I'd love to get out there and see it. I'm sure people in the room would too, thanks so much for joining us. It was, it was great to hear about what you're doing and good luck. And uh we look forward to hearing the results of this big experiment. Thank you. Have a great session, everybody. All right, thank you

Ford says "I like our chances" in competing against Tesla.

Bill Ford on Ford Motor future: "We're going all electric"

Bill Ford - Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Company

Leadership

bill. So good to see you again. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about all of the things that are changing at ford. And for starters you're in the michigan central train station in downtown Detroit. This was a historic building, a dynamic transportation hub and now you're announcing that you're partnering with google and others to modernize this historic building and turning it into a tech hub for startups and for entrepreneurs. Um why are you doing this every time there was a national story about the decay of Detroit, this would be the visual and frankly I was thinking of it. Uh but at the same time I realized that our industry was changing dramatically and that all these new technologies were in their infancy and that we needed a place to be a test bed and a development that if you will for all these new technologies. So um I bought the train station and we are completely renovated and it's gonna be absolutely beautiful. We're gonna have shops and restaurants and public art and you know green space and bike paths and all that around this campus. But I didn't want it just to be a trip down memory lane. I really wanted this to be where the future of transportation was invented. So this whole district is going to be about drones, robots, autonomous driving connected vehicles and all the things that are going to change in our future bill. You're also making huge changes at ford with a very aggressive push into electric vehicles, Why is the U. Turn? You know it wasn't so long ago that Ford was on the sidelines when it came to eat talking about E. V. S. What changed? Well you know a lot of it was Suzie, we weren't talking when others were we decided we would rather kind of walk softly and carry a big stick. So we didn't make a lot of grand pronouncements even as we were working on things like autonomous driving E. V. S. Um And I think the story kind of on the street was ford's not in the game but we were very much in the game but we don't want to just be in the game, we want to win. And so everything we're doing now and you mentioned TVs particularly TVs is about winning. And so we very consciously chose to electrify our most iconic vehicles first the mustang the F150 because I think that would signal to the world and also to our own company how serious we are about the electric vehicle push. Well you're spending billions of dollars on this electric vehicle development, you're building new manufacturing plants, you're hiring thousands of workers and you're saying that in eight years, about half of the entire force fleet will be electric. I mean what is it going to take to make this a reality? Well, interestingly the demand so far has been um much much greater than we anticipated. I mean we're basically we're sold out. We've already we haven't even made our first uh F. 1 50 Lightning E. V. We've already had to double capacity. Um, and probably we're going to have to do more down the road. And I think for the individual customers like on the Mustang Mach e, they're absolutely loving the vehicle. We have sky high customer satisfaction on that vehicle. So I think the trick is getting people into them and once they're into them they don't want to get out of it. Well, it's interesting you bring up the names of a couple of these vehicles because ford ceo jim Farley told investors recently that the company is building a modern forward with a portfolio of hot vehicles. You just talked about the F 1 50 what do you think in your portfolio are going to be the shore winners? You know, the F 1 50 of course just keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger than the best selling vehicle, you know, in the country for many, many years. But the electric version, we're completely sold out. Uh, the Mustang Mach e, that's been a huge hit. So we're really on a roll in the bronco. Uh, we're well, I wish we could make more broncos. Uh, so, you know, our product portfolio right now is the strongest it's ever been. But you know, when people talk about electric vehicles, they think Tesla, what do you have to do to compete with an established powerhouse like Tesla. Well we're doing it and you know, and I think the vehicle that really woke the nation up to ford seriousness and and it got us in, you know, at the forefront of the discussion was the electrification of the F 1 50 that caught so many people by surprise, including President Biden who came out and uh test drove it because it's not just putting a battery in a pickup truck. It actually can do things that gasoline pickup truck cannot do. Is that your edge against Tesla? Well it's against everybody, not just Tesla and are also R. E. Transit, our transit vehicle which is used for so many deliveries. Um it is the most popular man in the world. We've electrified that. We are the demand for that is sky high. So look, you know we're going all electric but we have some huge strengths as a company that we're capitalizing on as we go to electric. Well let's talk about that a little bit because General Motors is now saying that it will be the number one in E. V. S in the next few years which is the tougher challenge for ford going up against GM or Tesla. Well they're both tough and they're both really good companies and um you know but but I like our chances, the future is wide open right now for everyone and it's all gonna come down to who can actually um understand the customer how they live their lives and what they're looking for in a vehicle better than anyone else. And it's not just the hardware, it's also the software and what the vehicle can do to make your life easier and better. And the company that figures that out is going to win in the marketplace. So should Elon musk be worried? Look, my hat's off to Tesla. You know, they've done some great things. Um, but they've also largely had the field of themselves for a while and that won't be true in the future. We'll, you know, bill, I'm sure you've heard this from many people that they doubt that a 118 year old automobile company can reinvent itself and come out a winner. What do you say to the skeptics? Well look, we have to prove it. But frankly, you know, we didn't get to the age, we are without having to reinvent ourselves many many times and have gone through many transitions and you know, world wars and depressions and financial crisis and everything else. And so I really like our chances as we go forward. Bill, what do you think Henry Ford? Your great grandfather would say about ford going all electric. I think he'd say what took you so long? He would have leaned into all this new technology stuff, driving artificial intelligence, all of that. And as I say, I think you take a look at us today and say it's about time

Reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require big companies to partner with smaller startups.

We need new technologies to tackle climate change

Environment

The reality of where we are today is the planetary crisis that we're experiencing is not going to be solved by a single corporate entity. We need to be able to think on multiple time scales. We need to have our emissions by 2030 and all of the technologies that we need to do that and hit that first target in 2030 exists today. We will need more technologies in order to hit the 2050 target. Yeah, my name is Sean Stewart. I'm the Ceo here at new lab in the Brooklyn Navy yard. So it's a community of over 900 technologists building north of 200 different companies. And so what we do is we take these industries these legacy industries of mobility, of mining and we look at these large problems and whether advanced technology has evolved to be ready to actually make progress against these problems that and our innovation studios essentially have executed on that designed model which is bring together corporate entities, government bodies, academic research groups and the most advanced early stage technologists and entrepreneurs. The kind of challenge that we face from climate change requires that sort of all of society approach in order to get these solutions to scale and the effects. How do you access and locate that technology, test it, invest in it and accelerate its adoption the amount of government approval you need partnership with the utility companies, the ability to actually install on public streets. That is not an easy thing for a company of 30 employees to do. And so at the end of this 12-month innovation studio cycle, worst case they've just done a complete case study and pilot of their technology to prove its value. Best case is they spend the next 3-4 months negotiating to have a partnership to license the technology to invest in the company, acquire the company. We have a studio with ford in Detroit that looks at how we can accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, Fords overall climate commitment is about expecting 40-50% of the global vehicle volumes to be fully electric by 2030 rolling out electric vehicles is just step one. We have to think about electric vehicles at scale. We have to think about um, the desert of charging stations that we have when we talk about net zero, it's not just that we now have an electric vehicle longer term. We're going to need to think about industry and the ways in which we could be carbonized, uh, the production of things like steel, cement, all of the harder to abate sectors and that's going to take a lot of innovation, hard work and technology in order to hit those targets. The question of sort of hope and optimism in this, I tend to focus on the idea that action is what gives us hope it's a pet and so we need to get down that path as quick as we can see these problems are really big right there too big for one person to solve and certain that the foundational items around the electrified future mobility student of sustainability to the studio will really help achieve the goals that we're targeting. I wake up every day, I read the same news you read and I usually leave my house pretty pessimistic. Then I come here and there's 900 people working collaboratively together to solve some of the media's problems planet is facing.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett is stepping down

Autos

COO Jim Farley will become CEO on October 1.

Ford Motor

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As of 2/2/22

Ford Motor

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World's Most Admired CompaniesAs of 2/2/22

World's Most Admired Companies
As of 2/2/22