DETROIT – Yes, for all of those interested, Jessica Alba was in Detroit today.
The actress took top billing as first speaker at the Fuel Detroit leadership seminar at MotorCity Casino. She talked about her start-up "The Honest Company," which sells purportedly toxic-chemical-free personal care products like hand soap and baby cleaning items. She says she decided to start Honest because in trying to shop around the problem of avoiding products with what she viewed through her research as harmful, she found it was a losing battle.
Like most entrepreneurs, she felt there was a niche she could fill. Unlike most entrepreneurs, she had millions of dollars at her disposal to fund the company. She admitted she is constantly seeking unattainable balance in her life and solicited advice on how not to feel tired and sleepless trying to jam caring for two small children and a movie acting career while at the same time overseeing the marketing for a new and growing company into the day. Moreover, she allowed that she drinks lemon water and eats vegetables while her erstwhile CEO Brian Lee is fueled by Coca-Cola and frozen yogurt.
While the Hollywood flash was a nice touch and brought some cachet to this business networking and self-help program for entrepreneurs, it didn't offer a whole lot of unbroken new ground there.
No, this program needed something fresh and different, and it came from an unlikely source. New Ford CEO Mark Fields is a fairly well known quantity in Detroit. He was Ford's "Mr. Fix-It" long before Alan Mulally decided he would take the flyer and leave Boeing for Ford. Fields authored the turn-around plan Mulally used. Fields was under consideration at that time to become Ford's CEO but the books written about the auto downturn of 2008 and 2009 say Fields, in William Clay Ford Jr.'s estimation, needed more seasoning after a near fist fight with the CFO in an executive meeting.
So he worked alongside Mulally for eight years and learned what he needed to in order to take the helm in a rare, seamless, automotive CEO switch inside the Glass House. Fields is known as confident, a bit cocky and smart. He also hasn't made himself available to us in the media for extensive dives into what makes him tick. He's always all-business and that business is usually new products and the plans moving forward for things like the flagging Lincoln brand. He doesn't speak about himself often and so when he decided to do a half-hour, sit-down interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow, it had promise. But Fields knocked it out of the park. He opened up in a fashion we've not seen before and he gave some enlightening insights about how he views leadership, how he sees Ford's future and how he sees the world's future as the population swells and congregates in major cities.
He started out by dispelling the rumor that Detroit automakers are an anachronism.
"We're really challenging ourselves to really think like a start-up and for us that's about challenging customs, questioning tradition and using the technology curve where you can always focus in on the customer experience and testing and using it again," he said.
It's not a new concept -- Fields rolled out the announcement last fall of Ford changing into a "mobility company" instead of an automaker. But there are now two dozen global experiments Ford is doing that takes into account the fact that in major cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles or Beijing there are just too many people and too many cars and getting around is becoming all but impossible. At the behest of Chairman William Clay Ford Jr., Fields is leading the effort to try and figure out possibilities and business opportunities for Ford in the mobility area where owning a car is the last thing a city dweller wants to do. Will Ford simply rent cars? Will it sell bicycles? These are some of the things Fields and his team are looking at as part of a way to disrupt the old train of thought inside a car company. He says Ford genuinely wants to create a better world and do so by being a "mission purposed" company offering "accessible and affordable autonomous mobility with one foot in today and one foot in the future."
Fields admits he's not necessarily comfortable talking about himself in public because to him the company is the thing. But as CEO in forums like this there is that opportunity to open up and let the world see what the employees get to learn about their leadership.
For instance, Fields spoke proudly of how, upon graduating from Harvard with a Master's in Business Administration, he proudly came to Detroit looking "to actually work for a company that made things" while his classmates were all heading off to Wall Street millions. He said he went into Ford with a simple philosophy. Much like a first responder he decided to "run to the fire" and it served him well. He quickly moved up Ford's ranks becoming CEO of Mazda Motor at age 38 when Ford owned most of it. He said the Japanese took his ascendancy to the top chair as a sign of disrespect because he was so young. He depended heavily on his translator to tell him when he made missteps.
He also said he had to get a thick skin quickly because criticism was a regular part of the job. He said in that situation he learned two things: 1.) Have an inability to accept defeat and 2.) NOT be a victim.
This was the theme for the entrepreneurs in the audience. He told them "step back and ask yourself what drives you" then "dream with a deadline, have the end in mind and every day work toward it because if you don't, and live in the day, you will make yourself crazy; there'll be good days and bad days."
Above all, he said, operate "self-aware and self-reflective." He told stories about his days during the Ford turnaround and he was the first to admit things weren't going well with the Edge program he was running. The Ford culture of the time included not admitting trouble no matter the cost. He told the crowd it is vital "to have the courage and conviction and not shy away from the right thing to do."
At that time, Ford was on the road to losing $17 billion and those books about the turnaround say this was the fulcrum moment that changed Ford's culture. Fields likely sealed his executive fate in a positive fashion that day in 2010 by stopping Edge Production until a problem part was redesigned and fixed though it meant extra losses to a flagging company.
He said he used to spend a lot of time wondering what his next assignment would be, how he would move up the ladder. He said at some point it becomes about the company and not you. While "your ego can be seduced" he said today's leaders truly need to think about serving others as CEO.
"Instead of being the chief person with all the answers, become the person asking all the questions," he said.
This he undoubtedly learned from Mulally! He concluded his remarks with a note about team building. He has thousands of employees working for him but he said in the modern era CEO's need to ask themselves: "Do you want to be salt water to the roots or sunshine to the plant? When you do that, you get a lot more out of yourself and more out of your team.'
This all may sound self-serving for Fields in print, but rest assured you wouldn't see a blog this long if it weren't game-changing. Mark Fields showed the charisma and the leadership skills in public that his colleagues have seen up close and personal inside Ford and propelled him to the executive suite. To be sure, Fields has had a reputation in the past of being a fiery guy, tough to work for and a take-no-prisoners type of executive. No doubt that is true. But he also showed something today that helps explain how he made it to where he is, and it has little to do with that Harvard MBA.