American Icon by Bryce G. Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

would do whatever was required to turn the company around, but after a year as CEO, the burden of leadership was weighing on him. Ford was still interested in the big picture, but he had tired of the details of managing the company’s day-to-day operations.
    “I can’t say I’m having fun yet,” he acknowledged in an October interview with
BusinessWeek
.

    B ill Ford knew he needed help, and he knew he was not going to find it inside the company. He asked his director of human resources, Joe Laymon, to start looking outside the company.
    Joe Laymon was not a typical HR director. He did not spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to track mileage expenses or morale-building exercises. Laymon was an African American, and his father was a migrant farmworker, moonshiner, and civil rights activist from Mississippi. Laymon had picked his share of cotton before earning a master’s in economics from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He went to work for the United States Agency for International Development in Zaire, then took senior positions at Xerox and Eastman Kodak before arriving at Ford in 2000. There he soon became one of Bill Ford’s most trusted advisers—and his feared enforcer. Laymon was something of a latter-day Harry Bennett who, likehis legendary predecessor, also ran Ford’s internal security force. Unlike the brash Bennett, Laymon was a soft-spoken man whose friendly demeanor masked a calculating ruthlessness that other executives roused at their own peril.
    “Joe Laymon is a master of the dark arts,” one told me. “He knows where all the bodies are buried because he put most of them in the ground himself.”
    Laymon was also a master strategist who knew what motivated people and how to use that knowledge to his advantage. And he was fiercely loyal to Bill Ford.
    In 2003, the two men began putting together a list of possible candidates to lead the top-to-bottom restructuring that Ford now needed to save his company. Their first choice was easy. If the automobile industry had ever bred a rock star, it was Carlos Ghosn. His father was Lebanese like Nasser, but his mother was French and he had been born in Brazil. He joined Nissan Motor Company as chief operating officer in 1999 after France’s Renault SA bought a controlling stake in the Japanese automaker, which was then deeply in debt and losing money. Ghosn promised to resign if he could not turn it around. A year later, Nissan was profitable again and Ghosn was promoted to president. He became CEO a year after that, and Nissan became one of the most profitable car companies in the world.
    But Ford was still bigger, and Laymon hoped to use that as bait for the ambitious executive. Bill Ford told Laymon to offer Ghosn the position of COO with the promise that he would be promoted to CEO or become a very rich man if he was not. Laymon told his boss that Ghosn would never accept anything less than the top job, but agreed to try.
    A few months later, Laymon stood on the sidewalk in front of a trendy Tokyo restaurant wondering why Ghosn had insisted on meeting him outside. That became clear a few minutes later when he noticed a rare commotion down the street. A huge crowd was swarming around an unseen figure, thrusting pens and pieces of paper at the celebrity in the hope of getting an autograph. It was Carlos Ghosn.
    I don’t know if we have a suite big enough for this guy
, Laymon thought as the superstar CEO broke free from the crowd to shake his hand.
    It had taken Laymon three trips to Japan to get Ghosn to this restaurant. In the middle of dinner, he reached into his pocket, pulled out an envelope, and slid Ford’s offer across the table. Ghosn took a quick glance at it, shook his head, and handed it back to Laymon. He was not interested in working for Bill Ford. He would come to Dearborn. He would save Ford Motor Company. But he wanted to be CEO from the start—and chairman.
    “I can’t do that,” said a stunned Laymon.
    Ghosn smiled.