Streamline Training & Documentation: Taurus Redux

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Taurus Redux

The Taurus is a car I liked from the first time I spotted one out on the road. I continued to like it until Ford retreated from the oval rear window, and I'm intrigued by the plan to bring the marque back as the new name of the Five Hundred sedan, starting in the 2008 model year. To maintain the Mercury parallel, the Montego is being renamed the Sable. The Ford Freestyle crossover will be renamed the Taurus X.¹

As reported today by the AP, Ford CEO Alan Mulally is also a Taurus fan:

Mulally ... said he couldn't understand the Taurus' demise and doesn't know why the company gave up on the name of a car purchased by 7 million buyers during its 21-year history. All he knows is the decision was wrong and needed to be fixed.

"The Taurus, of course, has been an icon for Ford and its customers," Mulally told the AP. "The customers want it back. They didn't want it to go away. They wanted us to keep improving it."
. . .
Mulally, hired to rescue troubled Ford from his post at Boeing Co., studied the team-based approach to building the original Taurus and used some of its tenets in producing the highly successful 777 passenger jet.

That team-based approach was also used when the Taurus was redesigned in the early '90s, as described by Mary Walton in Car: A Drama of the American Workplace, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite business books.

Walton gives considerable attention to Richard Landgraff, the team leader, who had been with Ford for almost thirty years when the Taurus redesign project began in 1991. One of the first things Landgraff did was home in on the 1992 Toyota Camry as a benchmark for the new Taurus. As Walton reports, "Landgraff had decided that Ford had to either challenge Toyota or throw in the towel." She goes on:

At Ford, Landgraff knew he was considered an outsider, a maverick. He tended to say what was on his mind and do as he saw fit. He believed that it was best not to ask permission for what you had in mind. That only led to questions and delays. Just do it, until someone told you not to. So after his drive in the Camry, he had quietly ordered the DN101 [Taurus redesign] engineers to compare it to the Taurus, chunk by chunk. Who had what, and what it cost. Where Taurus was as good or better; where the Camry had the edge. What it would take to match Toyota. (pp. 45-46)

Landgraff decided that his team's mission would be to "deliver a product competitive with the Japanese on quality and function and better in styling, features and value."

The remainder of Walton's book describes how the team pursued the mission under Landgraff's leadership. It's a stirring story. Now we'll see what Mulally's crew is able to pull off.

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¹ "A crossover looks like a sport utility, but is made with car-type components. While a crossover cannot handle traditional S.U.V. tasks like heavy-duty towing or rugged off-pavement travel, in theory it should have a smoother ride, better handling and higher gas mileage than a truck." (Source: Christopher Jensen in the February 11, 2007 edition of the New York Times.)

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Labels: Leadership

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