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Business: Ford’s Fastest Whiz Kid

4 minute read
TIME

ROBERT STRANGE McNAMARA

TO the Ford Motor Co. in 1946 came a unique personnel package: a team of ten young Army Air Force officers who had racked up a notable wartime record working together on military production and supply. The “Whiz Kids”—as the team soon was known—applied their war-honed management talents to Ford’s vast auto empire, moved up fast in Ford’s executive ranks. None moved faster than a slim (6 ft, 165 lbs.) accountant with a computer mind. Robert Strange McNamara. Last week Bob McNamara, 44, was named president of Ford, the first non-Ford since Founder Henry in 1906 to occupy the presidency. Chairman and Chief Executive Henry will lay out broad company policy, President McNamara will have charge of company operations, stepping into the job left vacant last July by the retirement of Chairman Ernest Robert Breech, 63.

“Old Henry,” observed one automan last week, “would have thought McNamara bookish and rather impractical.” Bookish he looks—with his neatly parted hair and rimless glasses—and bookish he is (among his current reading: The Western Mind in Transition, The Phenomenon of Man, The Corporation in Modern Society). But he is far from impractical. He is one of the new breed of auto executives, like General Motors’ Fred Donner, who are more at home with cost sheets than blueprints, know market projections better than mechanical details. Even his talk about autos has a faintly bookish ring. “My biggest single problem as president,” says McNamara, “will be product planning.” Translated into plain Detroitese, he means selling cars: not only more of the present cars but also new cars.

Ford, riding the compact crest with its bestselling Falcon, is already planning new products to titillate car buyers. Last week Henry Ford announced that the company would spend $138 million in overseas plant development this year, another $220 million in 1961. Some $95 million of this is going to expand production lines for a new, still secret car in Germany, which is tentatively called the Cardinal. The guess is that it will be a Volkswagen-size car, to be sold in the U.S. as well as Europe. It may be out within two years. Ford is definitely bringing out next year a new 115-in.-wheelbase compact to be priced between the Comet and the standard-size Ford.

McNamara knows he faces an even bigger job in producing better cars. His goal is a car that in normal use need never see the inside of a service station. “Our twelve-month service warranty is a big step forward,” he says, “but we need more. One current target is the electrical system in cars, where there is plenty of room for improvement.”

Born in San Francisco, Bob McNamara was a rare sophomore Phi Beta Kappa scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. He took a master’s degree at Harvard Business School, then after a stint at Price, Waterhouse, went back to Harvard as an assistant professor for three years until the war. Though McNamara is perhaps the prize Whiz Kid, all six of the original group still with Ford have worked their way up to key executive posts. FORD’S new president is usually at his desk by 7:30 a.m., when most of his staff is just getting up, tries to leave for home by 6 p.m. Only 29 when he joined Ford, McNamara quickly earned the reputation of a man with clean, sharp answers. Says Henry Ford: “Things that most men have to turn to books and reports for, Bob is carrying around right in his head.” By 1949, McNamara was company controller, six years later became boss of the company’s breadwinner, the Ford division, two years later group vice president for all car and truck divisions. As group vice president, McNamara had an active role in bringing out the Falcon, also is given the credit for a decision that some auto buffs still disapprove: changing the sporty Thunderbird from a two-seater to a sedate four-seater. McNamara knew the market for a four-seater would be much bigger—as it has proved to be—even though the bird lost some of its flash.

Though his $400,000-plus annual compensation as Ford president will be more than he might have made in 30 years of teaching, McNamara still has a liking for the academic life. He lives in Ann Arbor, 38 miles from the Ford Co.’s Dearborn headquarters, with his wife Margaret and three children, because it is a university town. He frequently test-drives a competitor’s car on his commute to Ann Arbor. Recently, in a competing car, he was once more reminded of quality. The car stalled in a rainstorm. It took McNamara, soaking wet, three hitchhikes to get home.

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