Ford's Young Gun

By Daren Fonda

When Mark Fields became president of Mazda in December 1999, he seemed like the kind of American who would try to bulldoze through Japan's porcelain corporate culture--and slink home in frustration. A native New Yorker with a Harvard M.B.A., he appeared slick, headstrong and inexperienced. At 38 he was Mazda's youngest president ever--younger, in fact, than the average employee. He wore sharp suits (and still does). He had a habit of speaking in marketing lingo (which he no longer does). And like most foreigners in Japan, he committed the occasional faux pas. At one of his first dinners out with executives, he poured his own beer--a no-no among Japanese businessmen.

Yet Fields, who moved to Japan with his wife and two sons, proved adept at turning around an entrenched Japanese bureaucracy. Under his direction, Mazda was transformed from a floundering money loser to an automaker with net income of $66 million in its past fiscal year. Analysts hailed Fields as the next Carlos Ghosn--the executive who led Nissan's dramatic turnaround. Fields' bosses at Ford, which owns a controlling stake in Mazda, were so impressed that they handed him a bigger job: turbocharging Ford's troubled Premier Automotive Group (PAG), made up of Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo.

This month Fields is scheduled to start working out of the group's London headquarters. His mission: to increase PAG's net income ninefold, from an estimated $250 million to $2.3 billion by 2006. Achieving that goal will be no lay-up. With the exception of Jaguar--up 12%--PAG's sales were anemic last year compared with those of BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, which sizzled with hot offerings. PAG's sales are up so far this year, but its British vehicles still lag in quality: in the most recent "initial quality" survey by J.D. Power and Associates, Jaguar ranked 19th, behind Chevrolet and Pontiac; and Land Rover, at 32nd, stood behind such econo-box makers as Dodge and Hyundai. Fields will have to work his magic mostly by boosting efficiency and trimming costs through further sharing of parts and platforms across the brands--without jeopardizing each one's purebred appeal.

Is Fields up to the task? He certainly conveys a zoom-zoom work ethic. A graduate of Rutgers University with an economics degree, he usually hits the office by 6 a.m. and closes his days with 10 p.m. weight lifting and a two-mile run. He likes to drive fast too. At Mazda he skipped the chauffeur service in favor of a red RX-7 sports car. At PAG, though, he says he will forgo the Aston Martin: "We need to look for every efficiency, and driving an Aston wouldn't set a good example."

Fields comes with a reputation as a cost cutter and fix-it guy. Before taking over Mazda, he spent two years in Argentina restoring a troubled Ford operation to profitability. At Mazda, where he started as sales and marketing senior adviser, he found a remarkably inefficient bureaucracy. Shortly after arriving, he requested a report on Japan's domestic-car market. Three days later, a tome the size of the New York City phone book, and about as illuminating, appeared on his desk. "Its conclusions were severely lacking," Fields says. "Our investment bankers knew more about our business than some of our directors."

As president, Fields shuttered a factory in Mazda's hometown of Hiroshima, slashed the white-collar payroll by 20% and tied bonuses for directors and middle managers to year-end targets. To improve Mazda's balance sheet, he wrote off a $1.3 billion pension liability. And he had all salaried workers attend a two-day off-site, at which they were told that "Mazda must change or die." Says Katsumi Yoshitake, a 10-year veteran: "We knew we were in bad shape, but it seemed abstract." At the off-site, "a lot of it was bad news, but it made us feel truly part of the team." To keep up morale, Fields instituted flexible hours, on-site day care and time off to care for a family member. Once a month he would have lunch with plant workers to solicit suggestions for improvements.

Mazda squeaked out an operating profit as a result of such changes. But its real test is just starting. The firm's turnaround was based on cost cutting and boosted by a weak yen, which makes Mazda's vehicles cheaper abroad. The key to long-term growth is hot new models, but under Fields' regime, Mazda delayed new rollouts, concentrating instead on bolstering existing brands with better marketing and dealer support. "We were chasing Toyota and ended up with cars that didn't have personality," Fields says. In the coming months, Mazda will phase out two models and introduce three new ones, and how those vehicles fare will determine his longer-term legacy.

At PAG, Fields faces challenges that he never had at Mazda. He is taking over from the veteran Wolfgang Reitzle, a former BMW honcho respected for his product-development and engineering acumen. Analysts say Jaguar would not be in the black without Reitzle's insistence that the automaker not skimp on such engineering details as the six-speed gearbox in the S-Type. Some Ford watchers, though, say Reitzle's departure was timely. "Wolfgang was great on the brand side, but he was always banging heads against people on the cost side of the business," says analyst Scott Hill of Sanford C. Bernstein.

Fields acknowledges that "I'm not an engineer," and says he expects to have "much more of a business influence than a product influence." Indeed, PAG's new design chief, Peter Horbury, will report not to Fields but to Ford's design guru J Mays. Fields is expected to jack up volume, which will mean pushing harder into the entry luxury market, as Jaguar is doing with its X-Type. And he will have to make more raids of the Ford parts bin. Ford has reportedly killed Jaguar's plan, championed by Reitzle, to develop a platform for its next generation of large sedans, and is instead considering one developed with Lincoln and Volvo. Land Rover may incorporate Jaguar's new V-8 engine in its SUVs. And Volvo is expected to share more subsystems and component sets with various Ford divisions.

The risk is that Ford could sully the cachet of its luxury vehicles. Says Prudential Securities analyst Michael Bruynesteyn: "If you leverage platforms and components, it has to be done in a way consumers don't notice." Already purists sniff that Jaguar's S-Type shares so many parts with the Lincoln LS and Ford Thunderbird that it is a Ford alley cat in a Jaguar's skin.

But Fields has few options. The luxury market is getting ever more crowded as automakers, competing for the business of baby boomers entering their peak buying years, launch a slew of new models. Analysts estimate that margins on PAG brands now hover around 1%--compared with almost 9% at BMW--and that narrowing the gap will be a critical factor in how long Fields lasts in this job. At Mazda, he says, "I was very clear about confronting reality, focusing on accountability and execution." It's a game plan he hopes will work as well in London as it did in Japan.

--With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit