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Ford Motor Company wanted to help him escape.

Bill Ford had been wooing Farley since 2005. Long before he had even heard of Alan Mulally, Ford had been eyeing Toyota’s rising star and had learned three very important things about him. First, his family was from Michigan. Second, his grandfather had been an early Ford employee who went on to found a parts company that was still a Ford supplier. Third, Farley’s first car was a 1966 Ford Mustang that he still owned, along with a 1934 flathead Ford hot rod. Bill decided to reach out to him through a mutual friend, Larry Buhl.

“You should be back at Ford,” Buhl told Farley in late 2004, reminding him of his familial connection to the company. “They need help right now.”

Farley agreed to meet Bill Ford at the Detroit auto show in January 2005. Buhl snatched him from the Toyota stand and drove him to the same office building at the Detroit Lions’ training facility in Allen Park that Ford would later use for its secret meetings with the United
Auto Workers. The conversation was light. At the time, Bill Ford was starring in the company’s commercials and Farley asked him how those were being received.

“The research says women in their sixties and seventies think I’m cute,” Ford told him with a laugh.

Farley kept waiting for the job offer, but Ford seemed to want to talk about anything but that. Then, as the two men stood up to shake hands, Ford made a quick pitch.

“You know, we’d really like you to seriously consider coming to Ford,” he said.

“I’m really happy at Toyota,” Farley replied without even a moment’s hesitation.

Ford asked him to think about it. He gave Farley his phone number and told him to call if he changed his mind.

Farley doubted that would happen. He
was
happy at Toyota. But a personal tragedy forced Farley to take stock of his life. When he did, he began to wonder just how far he could go at Toyota. His former boss, Jim Press, had become the first non-Japanese on the company’s board of directors but was rumored to be chafing at what had turned out to be a largely symbolic promotion.
^*
Farley wanted more than that. He wanted to make a difference. He also wanted to be free. Farley prided himself on being a maverick, but the higher he rose at Toyota, the harder that became. On a spring day in 2007, he was driving down the 405 freeway near Los Angeles, fuming because he had been going back and forth with his masters in Japan for months over issues relating to the upcoming launch of the Toyota Tundra pickup. They kept overruling his decisions about a product he knew they knew nothing about. Toyota had just named Farley head of its Lexus division in the United States, but that now offered little consolation.

This is what it’s going to be like for the next twenty years, Jim
, he told himself.

He took his cellphone out of his pocket and called Bill Ford.

“I may be interested,” Farley said.

“Great,” Ford said. “I’d like you to meet our new CEO.”

Mulally was still looking for someone to lead Ford’s global sales and marketing operations. The lack of a chief marketing officer was the one big hole in his matrix organization. The position had not been filled after Hans-Olov Olsson retired in November 2006. While most of the company’s other functions were well on their way to being managed globally, sales and marketing was still largely a regional proposition, and Mulally was eager to change that. He had begun the search for a suitable candidate, taking personal responsibility for it because he knew this person would play a key role in the transformation of Ford. Farley’s name was already on the short list Joe Laymon had drawn up for Mulally when the Toyota executive decided to make the call.

During his next trip to Japan, Mulally had the Ford jet land at Los Angeles International Airport and met Farley inside a private terminal. Farley was nervous when he showed up for the lunch meeting. Toyota had been his life for seventeen years, and he felt like he was cheating on the company he loved. But he reminded himself that, unless he suddenly turned Japanese, that feeling would never be mutual.

Farley had no idea what to expect from Mulally. He had read about him in the newspapers but did not even know how to pronounce his last name. Like everyone else who encountered the grinning Kansan, he was immediately disarmed by Mulally’s charm—and by his lack of pretension. When Farley looked around for more dressing for his salad, Mulally got up and got it for him. That was something that would never happen at Toyota. But Farley did not think much of Mulally’s car company. He did not even consider Ford a competitor, except in the pickup truck segment.

They are totally irrelevant
, he reminded himself,
at least on this side of the Atlantic
.

When Farley was the head of sales and marketing for Toyota in Europe, Ford was the company that kept him up at night. At the time, Ford’s design still left a lot to be desired there, too, but its products offered the precision handling and driving dynamics that European motorists craved. Toyota’s did not. Farley had done his best to forget that after returning to the United States, but he was reminded of it
as Mulally pulled out a stack of printouts showing all of the cars and trucks Ford sold around the world and started spreading them out across the table. It was the collection of charts Mulally had pasted together himself shortly after arriving in Dearborn. He pointed to the page displaying Ford’s superior European lineup.

“Jim, just think if we could unleash the value of Ford’s global assets,” Mulally said, passing the sheet to Farley.

Oh my God! What if Ford had the driving dynamics from Europe, the quality of its Asian competitors, and the emotional appeal of cars that I love like the Mustang?
Farley thought as he studied the printouts.
If they could put all that together, it would be really cool
.

Mulally liked Farley instantly. As a devotee of Toyota, he had followed his work with Scion and thought it exceptional. He also knew that Farley had a reputation for being the voice of the customer inside Toyota, often challenging its designers and engineers in constructive ways to give the people what they really wanted. It was not adversarial. Farley did not pit marketing against product development. It was about working with that side of the business to make the company’s products the best in the world. That was exactly what Mulally was looking for—someone who could work with Derrick Kuzak to make sure Ford’s products were even better.

As Farley drove back to Toyota’s U.S. headquarters in nearby Torrance, he considered the possibilities. He had grown up loving Ford—not the company that was, but the company that had been. His grandfather had raised Farley on stories of Ford’s glory days, and those tales were what drove him into the automobile business in the first place. Farley’s grandfather had not opposed his decision to Toyota, but he had asked him to find his way back to Ford if he could. Until now, that had seemed like a road to nowhere, but Farley began to wonder what it would take for Ford to reclaim its former greatness. The idea of helping Ford do that was suddenly incredibly exciting.

We could do this
, he thought.
Jim, there’s a whole other world you don’t know about. You could really leverage your skills
.

Farley went over his own qualifications to make sure he was up to the challenge. He knew the American car business as well as anybody. He knew Europe. He knew the premium segment. He knew dealers.
He knew about product planning. And, most important, he knew how to really shake things up.

If they are smart, they’ll give someone like me enough rope to hang himself
, he mused.
I think the situation is bad enough at Ford that they will be open to new ideas. But can I fit in, or will I be rejected like a bad organ?

Fitting in was Farley’s biggest concern. He knew Ford’s culture was quite a bit different from Toyota’s, and he worried that many of the executives in Dearborn might dislike him from the start because of his service to the enemy. But Farley desperately wanted to do something meaningful with his life, and he could think of nothing more meaningful than saving the American icon that his grandfather had helped create.

As soon as he got home that night, Farley’s wife knew he wanted to take the job.

“Damn,” she said. “I knew you shouldn’t have seen that guy.”

Farley may have been one of the highest-ranking Americans in Toyota, but his wife’s résumé was pretty impressive, too. Lia was a successful script supervisor in Hollywood. She spent her days working beside big-name directors and her evenings attending glamorous parties with Tinsel Town’s great and good. Jim and Lia both knew there would be little use for her talents in Michigan. She was also about to give birth again. Farley told her he knew he was being selfish, but said he would regret it for the rest of his life if he turned Ford down. After talking it over for a few days, Lia told him to call Mulally.

Farley had a couple of questions before he accepted the job. One was about compensation. The other was about Mark Fields. Farley knew the president of Ford’s Americas group would see him as a threat, and he wanted to make sure Mulally would have his back.

“Will you really let me do my thing, or will you let those guys kind of just squash me in the garage?” Farley asked.

Mulally assured Farley that no one would get in his way. But Ford’s CEO could tell there was something else bothering the Toyota executive. Mulally pressed him, and Farley admitted this was a tough decision for his wife. Mulally asked Farley to put her on the telephone. He worked his usual magic. They talked for nearly an hour. Mulally
thanked Lia for giving up her career and promised that Farley would have a great one at Ford.

“Okay,” she said finally, passing the phone back to her husband.

“I’ll join you, Alan,” Farley said. Mulally congratulated him, but Farley cut him short. He had to take his wife to the hospital. His son was born a few hours later.
^*

O
n October 11, 2007, the automotive world was stunned by the news that Jim Farley was leaving Toyota to become vice president of sales and marketing at the still-struggling Ford Motor Company. His defection sent shock waves through Toyota’s North American ranks and left its dealers shaken and worried. Ford’s dealers could not have been more thrilled. Everyone in the car business knew about Jim Farley, and they could not wait for him to start working his magic at Ford.

“Jim is a car guy, and that means a lot to me as a dealer,” said Kent Ritchie, a longtime Toyota franchisee who had recently traded that dealership for a Ford store in Memphis. “
I’ve seen him roll up his sleeves and get dirt under his fingernails. I think my investment just became worth a lot more money.”

Mulally was just as ebullient about the newest member of his senior leadership team.

“
This is a big deal,” he said that afternoon. “I want him to really help me take the marketing capability and that functional expertise to a new level of performance inside Ford, to bring the voice of the customer in—their wants, their needs, what they value—and to use that to help us design cars and trucks.”

A month later, Farley was at LAX, waiting for a red-eye to Dearborn. He paced the terminal, thinking about everything he had just given up and the enormous challenge that lay ahead in Dearborn.
After decades of declining quality, product missteps, and corporate blunders, he had to convince the American people that Ford Motor Company deserved another chance. Farley walked into the bathroom, found an empty stall, and threw up.

T
wo weeks after it announced the hiring of Jim Farley, Ford sent out another press release announcing the retirement of Vice President of Communications Charlie Holleran. He was replaced by Ray Day, a quiet, calculating public relations executive who could not have been more different from his predecessor. Where Holleran had been easygoing and slightly rumpled, Day was a tightly wound neat freak who could not abide an out-of-place hair. Where Holleran had relied on experience and instinct, Day put his faith in research and analytical reports. That made him a far better fit with Mulally’s data-driven approach to management. Under Holleran, the communications department bucked that trend, insisting that what it did could not be quantified in the same way as sales or engineering. Mulally never believed that, and he told Day that he wanted the department to start acting like the rest of Ford. That meant functioning globally and living by its own set of metrics.