Have you driven a Ford Lately? Thanks to Donald Peterson you may want to.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

HAVE YOU DRIVEN A FORD LATELY?

On a very dark day in 1980, Donald Petersen, newly chosen president of Ford Motors, visited the company design studios. Ford was in the process of losing $2.2 billion, the largest single-year corporate loss in U.S. history. The future seemed equally bleak. Most Fords could charitably be described as iron thunder lizards. There was no minimum to the number of them Petersen could sell.

Petersen had come to review proposals for a new Thunderbird--the model that had been Ford's flagship but through the 1970s had grown about as exciting as a tuna trawler. He was shown the customary sketches of big, boring boxes. Ford designers, truth be told, hated their own designs. Often they had tried to propose interesting cars like the Europeans and Japanese were building. Top management always shot them down. There was only one kind of car headquarters wanted to hear about: A Car Just Like Last Year's.

After examining some sketches, Petersen looked up at the designers and asked, "Are you proud of these?' There was a pause. In big corporations people are handsomely paid not to say what they think.

"No. I'm embarrassed by them,' Jack Telnack, Ford's chief of design, answered. Then the designers wheeled out clay models of a different type of Thunderbird--aerodynamically smooth, European influenced. There was even a sporty version configured for the BMW crowd with a small high-tech engine, a five-speed transmission, and no chrome. When was the last time anyone saw a stick in a Thunderbird? Maybe 1956.

This Thunderbird design represented everything cars are supposed to be and Detroit products never are. Functionality. Taking the driver seriously. Appealing to the consumer's better judgment, rather than the market research department's lowest common denominator. Headquarters was bound to hate it.

Petersen said go ahead.

It was the day the scales finally fell from Detroit's eyes. For more than a decade American auto manufacturers had been kidding themselves into believing that imports were a fad. They paid dearly during the auto recession of the early 1980s, Ford worst of all. From 1980 to 1982, Ford lost almost $4 billion.

Ford sustained, in fact, much more severe losses than Chrysler or Lockheed, whose recoveries via bailout have been widely celebrated. Had Ford failed, the impact on the U.S. economy would have been far greater than a Chrysler or Lockheed collapse. Ford somehow slips by with little public attention, despite being number four on the Fortune 500 and the fifth-largest industrial corporation in the world.

Today Ford is back, both in money--in the second quarter of 1986 its profits surpassed GM's, despite the fact that GM sells twice as many cars--and in product quality. Dullsville cars referred to collectively as "Squaremonts' have been replaced by sporty cars that attract young buyers. The new Thunderbird, after enduring industry jeers prior to its 1983 release, has become a huge success: it is the number-one selling car in California, bellwether of the auto market and a state that in recent years has practically been a province of Japan. Automotive observers now generally consider Ford's manufacturing quality to be the best of the Big Three; Fords have pulled within striking distance of Japanese brands in the annual Consumer Reports frequency-of-repair ratings.

Meanwhile Ford has reformed itself internally, changing from a notoriously rigid bureaucracy, where managers quaked at the sight of their own shadows, to decentralized mellow-land, straight out of In Search of Excellence.

It's fair to say that Ford's comeback-- accomplished entirely without federal aid--is the most significant economic recovery in recent American history. Yet it has occurred with little public notice and with almost complete anonymity for its leader, Donald Petersen, who last year moved up from Ford president to CEO. But then his profile has never been high. Even after he took over the helm at Ford, the company's proxy statement misspelled his name.

Those left standing at the top of the organization chart are usually seen as egotists, martinets, or drones. Petersen in constrast seems like a Totally Normal Guy. He is softspoken, mild, nearly paternal: the kind of father figure who would insist that you do your homework, then bring you a cup of cocoa as you worked.

Born in 1926 on a farm in Pipestone, Minnesota, Petersen would appear on paper to be the last person in the world to lead an assault against corporate tradition. One, he's a lifer--been with Ford since 1948, never having had another employer in adulthood. Two, he's an engineer-- the first Ford CEO since Henry himself to have product knowledge, rather than training in finance or skillful selection of parents, as his primary credential. Three, he endured more than 30 years of internal feuding and tantrum-throwing on the part of Henry Ford II, former Ford president Lee Iacocca, and others in Ford corporate management, without ever publicly protesting. The most commonly used adjective for Petersen is "quiet.' For relaxation, he collects rocks. Not exactly the personality profile of a revolutionary.

"People complain that Petersen is too quiet,' said Joseph Kordick, a Ford general manager. "That's because he's listening. They don't know how to deal with a CEO who actually listens to the people beneath him.'

A dull man of substance

One day in April, Petersen and I toured a stamping plant in Monroe, Michigan. The plant is only one hour from Ford world headquarters, yet no Ford CEO had ever seen it.

Petersen travels in a Taurus family sedan. Not a limo, not even a Lincoln. There's a phone up front and an adjustable reading light rigged into the back seat headliner. Without these extras, you can have the car the CEO of a $39 billion corporation rides in for about $12,000.

Looking at the car I wondered, Where are they going to put the steely-eyed bodyguards? The flurry of aides? There were none. Petersen is the highest-ranking person I have ever observed to travel anywhere, even down the hall, without a cavalcade of briefcase-holders and brown-nosers swirling around him.

His reception at the plant is a triumph of minimalism. A guard stands in the street to point toward the parking lot; that's it. Some plant officials show Petersen to a small, stuffy conference room--Monroe is a manufacturing facility, as opposed to an assembly plant, which means the inside is noisy and grimy. There is no evidence of any special cleanup or fuss in anticipation of the boss.

Supervisors and UAW members crowd into the conference room for a short speechmaking session during which Petersen seems uncomfortable being the center of attention. There is a monitor at one end of the conference room for the factory's closed-circuit television system; inexplicably, "Night Court' plays in the background throughout the session. Petersen asks Stan Cronenwett, the plant manager, technical questions about the Monroe operations. ("What forms does your steel arrive in, Stan?') Cronenwett talks about educational services for workers, including aid in completing high school, offered "if only in the hopes of helping them understand basic economics.'

Cronenwett gives Petersen a blue barracuda jacket like the ones plant supervisors wear. He puts it on. Then Les Burnett, Building Chairman of Local 723, hands Petersen one of the sharp black and gold softball jackets of the local, with "honorary member' stitched beneath his name. In big-industry labor relations, this just doesn't happen: most major industrial unions would be more likely to give the CEO a cement overcoat. Petersen seems genuinely pleased. He is also perplexed as to which of the jackets he should wear onto the plant floor. "We outnumber you,' Burnett notes. Petersen goes with the union label.

Petersen has invested nearly all his moral capital in a labor relations reform program called employee involvement. "At first we thought this employee involvement program was a lot of B.S.,' Burnett tells me as we walk along the factory floor, "but now we think it's for real.' He points to a wheel-making line. "See that? The hourly people control that whole line. There's no supervisor. I never would have believed I would live to see anything like that or to be saying nice things about the company.'

A few years ago Monroe was on the verge of closing. Now, though total staff is down from 3,000 to 1,750, its future appears secure. Over the opposition of UAW national leadership, the local made concessions on job classifications, which in "mature' industries are often a greater problem than wages, as they tend to force companies to retain outdated, unproductive methods. Thirty-three robots have been added to Monroe since 1982, when there was no automation. Much of the plant's new equipment comes from Japan. Watching a gigantic, $5 million, imported transfer press spit out parts, I felt a sudden delight to think that I might be witnessing Japanese capitalism selling us the rope that would be used to hang them--equipment we would use to catch back up.

Petersen spends considerable time poking around the plant, questioning workers. Then he heads to another conference room to meet with the employee involvement committee. There are 19 UAW...