... "We call our North American plan, The Way Forward. It's bold and sweeping and it builds on the innovation-driven vision we talked about last September. It's a strategy that calls for sacrifices at all levels of the Company. It puts the customer first. And it demands we look beyond short-term financial targets to create sustainable, profitable change in our North American business.
Ford Motor Company stands for a far-sighted commitment to growth. We stand for a renewed focus on the customer. We stand for boundless innovation in every aspect of our business – from design, to safety, to fuel-efficiency, to efficiency on the factory floor.
Here is what we will not stand for: incremental change, avoiding risk, thinking short-term, blocking innovation, tying our people's hands, defending procedures that don't make sense, and selling what we have instead of what the customer wants. In short, we will not stand for business as usual. We must be guided by our long term goals of building brand, satisfying customers, developing strong products and accelerating innovation.
This is going to require change number three: we must unleash our spirit of American innovation. To me, innovation is seeing what others can’t see, and using that vision to build what others have never built. It's the only way to make a car that’s smaller, yet roomier; lighter, yet safer; faster, but more fuel-efficient. Innovation resolves contradictions. It flattens old barriers, and it’s the heart of all progress.
Innovation will drive our new advances in safety. Ford and Volvo engineers are exemplifying that by working together on safety innovations like a new collision-avoidance system, night-enhanced vision and the next generation air bag. Finally, American innovation will drive our new advances in fuel-efficiency – to offset high gas prices, the environmental impact and dependence on foreign oil. By 2010, more than half our Ford, Lincoln and Mercury products will have hybrid capability. We’ll have the capacity to produce up to a quarter of a million hybrids a year, and scale up as the market demands. Right now, we are also offering four new flex fuel vehicles for 2006 that run on a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. These new advances in fuel-efficiency – as well as bold American design – all spring from innovation.
The Rouge is another example of innovation. Despite cynicism and institutional barriers, we built the most progressive assembly plant in the world. The Rouge marries lean, flexible, and environmentally friendly manufacturing with America 's best-selling vehicle, the F-Series truck.
Today, we are moving from a culture that discourages innovation back to a company that celebrates it. In this effort, we recently sent out a mailing to 120,000 US dealers, employees and retirees asking for ideas. Going forward, our employee evaluations will include a section on innovation. We’re also going to design compensation plans that reward new thinking. And we’re going to create a way for employees to appeal a decision, even if they have an idea and the boss says no. We also launched an innovation website in November to solicit ideas from employees. In our first month, we received more than a 1,000 ideas, and we’re following up on some very promising ones. This company was founded by an inventor; we want to make sure that today the company is overflowing with innovators. We’re going to find them, encourage them, and then we're going to reward them.
This is what it is going to be like at Ford: Far-sighted, customer-focused, and innovative. We also have to reduce the gap between Ford and our competitors in material costs. Doing so will not only improve our cost structure through economies of scale, but it will allow us to foster greater innovation through stronger, smarter partnerships with our key suppliers.
The only way to compete would be to become far-sighted, customer-focused, and innovative – exactly what we were a hundred years ago, and exactly what we need to become today to win again in America and around the world.
I know that if we come together behind these shared goals we can seize our heritage of innovation and emerge stronger than we've ever been. " ...
Innovation-Driven Vision: Ford Motor Company: via Ford Motor Company: FORD DECLARES RESURGENCE OF FORD MOTOR COMPANY ...
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