Well good afternoon everyone, it's great to see you as everyone kind of comes in and shifts and sits down. It's good to see you Bill and Alexandra. Welcome to the Mackinac Policy Conference. Thank you so much.
And I want to say congratulations on your seat on the board. You are the first female Ford family member since 1903 to be on the board, so that's true. Congratulations.
I think I want to start off with the visual of you sitting here, the both of you together, because we all know family dynamics, we all know parent-child dynamics. How does it feel to be sitting in these positions together? Let me start with you, Bill.
Well, I wish I had different children. No, no, it's been great. I actually love it. For both Alexandra and her two brothers who both work at Ford, it's really been a way of life. It's not a job. They had to come to it on their own. This was not something I could ever say to any of them, 'I would like you to do this.' It wouldn't work. They had to feel it, they had to want it. Thankfully for me, all three of them came to that conclusion, but they all had to start somewhere else first, and they all have. I absolutely love having all three of them there. As every parent in this room will understand, you better be ready for what you hear, because I stop being the head of Ford Motor Company when I walk in the door at home. Frankly, they will tell me things that nobody else will, and I value that.
I love the idea of the generational culture and tension. Alexandra, you worked with the company for several years on innovation, EVs, the autonomous program as well, and now you're sitting on the board. Tell us a little bit about where your focus is lying.
Yeah, I mean, we are always focused on the future. A lot of people think about family involvement as being protectors of the past, and that is absolutely not how we view our role. A lot of that stems from Dad and how he thinks about the company, but we just have such a rich opportunity set ahead of us. The industry is changing so rapidly, so I'm really focused on everything that's going to come for our company. Every time I'm thinking about decisions, I'm thinking, 'Are we going to be happy about this decision in five years? What about 10 years, 20?' That really long-term focus allows us to have a lot of stability but also a great growth mindset. So I spend a lot of my time thinking of course on the matters of the day, but very long-term focused as well.
When you talk about having your children, you also have Will and Nick who are at the company. Is there arm-twisting? Is there unfair expectations of having your children at the company, and what does that feel like?
Well, I'm sure there are unfair expectations, but I put into place something a few years ago that I won't violate, which is to say to not just my children but any of my nieces and nephews: if you want to work at Ford, you must do several things. Number one, you must have a graduate degree from a top university in a relevant topic—business, law, engineering. Then you must go work somewhere else for a minimum of five years. After you've done all of that, if you still want to come to Ford, then you come see me, and it's still not a guarantee. It's for their own protection, frankly, that they know they stack up against all their peer group, but it's also for the company's protection. We cannot be a family employment agency. So I want to make sure that the young people in our family coming into the company are incredibly well-qualified, very motivated, and understand all the things that come with it. Part of having them work somewhere else for five years is several-fold: one, they will succeed or fail on their own, not because of who they are; but secondly, they'll grow up somewhere else. They don't have one foot still in the university campus. I think that's important too. Nonetheless, there are expectations, and many of my relatives have chosen not to come to Ford.
You have one daughter? I have two daughters. Obviously Alexandra, and I have a daughter who's a psych PhD psychologist, and she'll never have to leave the family for—her work is cut out for her at the family dinner table.
Exactly. No, no, she's got a building client base forever.
Well, let me ask you, Alexandra: what was that conversation like when he said, 'You have to go have an advanced degree, you have to go out for five years, and then come see me and talk to me'? What was that conversation?
Well, it's interesting because he did just that, and it happened more naturally. I actually went to go work in retail first, and I'm so glad I did. First of all, you're at Tory Burch in San Francisco and then Tory Burch in New York, and I loved it. Not only that, I'm glad that I had a normal corporate company experience. I had failures, I had promotions. Then when I did feel the tug to come work for Ford, I did that first through an MBA internship. I'll be candid: I didn't have the best experience, and I thought that meant a career at Ford was not going to be for me. I was nervous. But I went to tell him, and his reaction was fantastic: 'I'm thrilled. Now you can go figure out what makes you happy and what you do want to go do.' I stood there frustrated because it would have been so much easier if he had told me, 'You have to work here.' That would have been such an easier decision for me to make. But then it was on me to figure out a good fit for myself within the company, and I found it, and I found many more since then. I'm so happy the decision was mine because, as fun as the industry is, it's a tough industry. If I didn't really want to be here and I hadn't had that challenge and know I really want to be here, it wouldn't be as much fun as it is.
So what is the family dinner table like? Is the conversation ever suspended from Ford?
Yeah, I mean, look, in many ways it's probably no different than yours or anybody else's. You're catching up. But there's always been an element of Ford for all of us from the day that they were born, and it's inescapable. It's who we are, what we grew up with. I'm only the fourth family member in what is it now, 122 years, to be head of the company. We do talk a lot, and we argue a lot as families do, and I love that because I don't get a lot of honest feedback in my job, frankly, and there's no shortage of that at our house.
What do you think the value thread is that has gone through the generations? Is there a certain mantra, a certain phrase? What would you say it would be, Alexandra?
Yeah, you know, we were never sat down and taught the company values. It was just part and parcel with how we were raised. It would be very difficult to separate the corporate values from our family values, and we mostly learned them from watching Dad, at least I did. I'll give you an example: he would always go out of his way to tell us about his day and his work and the experience he had, and whenever he spoke about employees, it was always with deep respect. That leaves an impression. So it's really for us about, of course, amazing products and amazing vehicles, but more it's about the people, leaving the world a better place, taking care of our customers, our employees, the communities we live in, helping when we can because we're usually in a position to do so. At no point was there a transfer of those values. I don't remember anything other than those values, so it's very easy to uphold them. You could argue it's difficult and you get challenged quite a bit, but it's all we know. It's a great guidepost because so many things in our world are changing by the day and the hour and the minute, and to know where you won't back away from is actually great comfort. Otherwise, you might not know where your north is.
What's the generational value thread that you think you've picked up on, Bill?
Well, Alexandra really touched on it. I've always believed that if companies aren't making people's lives better, then they shouldn't exist. For us, it's always about the communities in which we operate, whether it's Detroit and what we can do for Detroit, or Michigan, or anywhere else we operate. To me, that's what a great company does: it has values and then it lives by them. It's easy to talk about them; you just have to live them. It's about giving back every single day. I've found that it comes back to you many more times than you give. I can think of so many examples, but maybe the most stark was during the financial crisis when we were right on the edge of not making it. I got flooded with notes, letters, and emails from employees at all levels, from the plant floor up, saying, 'Hey Bill, don't give up. We can do this. This is a great company.' Normally those are top-down, but they were all coming back to me saying, 'We love this company and we will not let this company fail.' And guess what? They didn't. As others went bankrupt around us, our employees simply wouldn't let us fail. It's because the company has to be more than a paycheck. If all it is is a paycheck, forget it. It's not worth it. This is too hard a business to find ways to get excited unless you truly believe and live the values that I believe, that Alexandra believes, and that so many of our employees believe. In fact, pretty much all our employees, because if they don't believe it, they're not going to fit in and they shouldn't last.
Is it difficult though when you have this global corporation where everyone is coming at you, and you're also in an industry that is constantly changing, and again we are going to be talking about the political nature of where we are in turbulent times? Focusing on these values, community-oriented, do you find it difficult to continue to keep the model?
No, actually I think it's a strength. As Alexandra said, it really gives us a grounding and a true north in terms of who we are and what we're going to do, come hell or high water. In a world that's ever-changing and ever-turbulent, to know exactly who you are, what you stand for, and where you should be spending your time, your effort, and your money—I think that actually makes life a lot easier.
So Alexandra, with that premise though, there has got to be a little bit of generational clashing or rubbing in terms of maybe we should do it this way. If we have our true north, but there are different ways that we can do things, Dad?
Well, I tell him about a hundred times a day all the different ways we could be doing things, but he's receptive to them. What I think is really interesting about this conversation, and we talk about it a lot, is there are values which are unchanging, and then there's culture which needs to change all the time, strategies which need to change all the time, products of course need to change all the time. When we think about it as a family, there are really no sacred cows within the company aside from our values. We're receptive to changing just about anything. But there are things we believe deeply in: we believe our home is in Michigan, we believe in American manufacturing, we believe in making people's lives better. Everything else—one of the benefits of family involvement is we have such a long-term focus. You have to adapt, you have to evolve to stay relevant and competitive, so it's really a mandate that we have. When I call him up or we talk amongst our cousins and brothers and everyone who works at the company, and we come up with all these different ways to do things, there's a real receptiveness to it because we have to.
So there isn't like a separate group chat between you, Nick, and Will saying—
Yeah, at my expense. In fact, it always is. We have one with him and one without him.
Is there anything that you can give us, like a specific example of some of the things that you've wanted to see change?
You know, I love this guy. I've been looking forward to this conversation all day. No, well, I'll give you an example. When I first came to work at the company, it's no surprise, but I was underwhelmed by the facilities in which I was working. I actually had this funny text chain going where I would just casually send him photos and videos of all the things that I found that weren't quite up to snuff in our building. Some of them were funny, some of them needed to change. I felt if I'm seeing this and I have all the pride in the world for this company, then a different employee might not be as forgiving. They shouldn't work here either. So we have fantastic new buildings, we opened Michigan Central Station, and we have really invested in our facilities for our customers and in our plants as well. Those are things that we really care about. Whether it's things like that, whether it's corporate maternity leave policies, or products that we think are interesting, I think we talk probably 10 times a day, but for about 30 seconds each.
Do you really? I want to get on that text thread so badly I can't even tell you. Let's talk a little bit about leading during turbulent times right now. I think one of the big questions people have in this room is we know what's happening with the change in the White House and President Trump. When's the last time you've spoken to President Trump, and what is the line like back and forth between the White House and Ford?
Well, we speak to the White House almost on a daily basis. The hard part for a lot of people in Washington, this has always been the case regardless of party, is to understand that our lead times as an industrial manufacturer are longer than political lead times. We can adapt to almost anything except uncertainty, and unfortunately where we are right now is there's nothing but uncertainty. You look at all the tariffs. At one point we had four layers of tariffs on us: we had the fentanyl tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs, the auto tariffs, the steel and aluminum tariffs. All of that unintentional, and yet there we were. I think that proves the point that unintentionally there are so many tails to our industry, and we get hit with so much that people don't necessarily realize. So we have to have the line of communication open, and we do. I completely agree with what the president wants to do, which is to have a strong American industrial base. We're the most American company. We make 80% of our vehicles here; most of our competitors make 50% or less. It's cost us over the years—it's about a $2,000 vehicle penalty versus our domestic competition because we've chosen to be the most American. But I always felt that was the right thing to do. So I completely agree with the goal. The question is getting there. It can't go like this. There are too many things that are tails on those decisions that have to be worked through. We live in a time of great uncertainty, whether it's tariffs, things like access to rare earth which go into so many industrial products, emission regulations and where those are going. While we are very adaptable, we do have long lead times, and that I think sometimes is completely out of sync with the way Washington—and I don't mean necessarily the current administration, I mean every administration—has to work. That's always been a challenge for us. We've had Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, and each time there have been policy changes that affect us. We head down one road, have to pull a U-turn, go down that road, pull a U-turn. It's enormously disruptive and financially it's really tough. We have to do it, and we're going to get through it. I love where we're positioned as Ford. We have tremendous flexibility, but nonetheless it does take its toll.
Alexandra, you did a lot of work on innovation and EVs. What could you say in terms of what you're seeing right now in terms of marketing for EVs and people's real want for them now in the next five years? Because the goalposts keep changing.
The goalposts do keep changing, and that's why I believe as a company—it comes from my retail experience—if you do right by the customer, I think you have the strongest shot at success. We serve so many different customers over the history of our company. It's not our job to tell customers what to buy; it's our job to make incredible products that they want to buy. We believe that ICE vehicles, hybrid vehicles, all the different types, EVs are a great product for different types of people for different types of things. While that does make it more complex—now we have to be very good at many different types of propulsion and different types of vehicles—we think it's the right thing not only because it lends us this flexibility, but it honestly allows the customer to tell us what they want. That's their job, and it's our job to make great things for them. The way we'll navigate this the best is we have to advocate for the success of all of the different types of vehicles, but we'll be most successful if we just keep listening to our customer and trying to push those customers forward into those vehicles.
I think it's really interesting, Bill, that we see that in the beginning when the tariffs were starting, the auto industry as a whole—GM, Ford—you've kind of advocated together and talked to the White House saying, 'Look, this is going to be very difficult for automakers here in the US.' How do you walk the line of advocating as an industry but yet in serious competitive times? Because I can't go through a newspaper or see a Ford ad on television without hearing Ford touting its investment here in the United States.
Well, I think we have to continue to do that. Let me put it this way: if our competitors had our footprint, we'd have 15 more auto plants in this country and four million more jobs. That tells you our commitment to this country, and nobody else has that. I don't want that to go unnoticed. Having said that, yes, in most respects we are aligned with GM, Stellantis, and frankly Toyota and others in terms of getting the supply base fixed, not having the supply base tariffed as parts cross the border several times. We just have to make sure there's alignment around policy. But you're right, each company is very different, each company has a different view of the world, and that can't change frankly because we do compete. We've made decisions—maybe their decisions are better, I don't know—but for us it was the right decision to invest in America and to pay that penalty. I don't regret that for a minute. But that sometimes does put us at odds with others when we try to talk about the industry. There are several industry groups we're part of, and we can agree on about 90% of the things, but there will be some things that we simply won't.
And as things continue to change, Alexandra, you know there was an announcement earlier in the month about a big loss of operating profit because of the uncertainty of where everything is with tariffs. I think you have customers looking saying, 'Gosh, how much more am I going to be paying for a car a year from now?' How do you take those considerations into play every day?
Those are huge considerations because even without this uncertainty, affordability is top of mind within our company. We want everybody to be able to afford the vehicle that they want, whether it's an ICE vehicle or an EV vehicle. That's a real consideration for us. Like my dad was saying, the political lead times and the production lead times simply don't match up. When we have that level of uncertainty, it's difficult for us to do the math. We'll do the best we can. We really hope that things don't have to trickle down to the customer because protecting the customer, back to our values, is something we really believe in. We'll do the best we can.
