So I caught a few minutes of the Ford press conference this moring as I was getting ready for work. Job cuts, plant closings, big changes, new ways of designing and building cars, fewer SUVs, yadda yadda. What caught my ear, though was Bill Ford on the TV saying (more or less) “Why didn’t we make these changes sooner? We didn’t have to.”
One of the more memorable things my Systems prof told us last semester was, “Don’t boil the ocean.” If Ford really thinks they’re capable of making sweeping companywide changes in a smooth, adroit manner, they’re kidding themselves. A company that sat on its butt doing little more than raking in the profits on oversized low MPG SUVs when their competition was taking them to the cleaners is not going to be able to pull that kind of a move off. Toyota or Honda might, but the whole reason Ford is in this mess is because they are not Toyota or Honda.
One of the CNBC commentators noted that the scope of the plant cuts announced implied that Ford was cutting production capacity by about 1 million automobiles. I wonder what that’s going to do to the dealership network. Job losses due to dealership closings will not be counted in the press releases, but surely Ford will not need the same number of dealers if they’re producing so many fewer cars.