The abrupt removal this week of Mr Jac Nasser as chief executive of Ford Motor Company can be seen in two ways. Either the family that controls the world's second-largest car-maker has acted radically to restore its fortunes, or it has shown its innate conservatism by dispensing with a chief executive who was halfway through a necessary, if fraught, modernisation effort.

The discontent within the family, led by Mr Bill Ford - great-grandson of the legendary Henry Ford - has been simmering for months. This autumn it boiled over, prompted by a series of profit warnings and the first dividend cut for a decade.

At a board meeting this week, Mr Ford and his supporters insisted that Mr Nasser had to pay the price for a strategy that had left Ford facing a crisis on several fronts.

Mr Nasser had only a few hours' warning of his impending removal, confounding assurances from the family and close executives that his position was secure.

"It was obviously a boardroom coup and Bill Ford has been putting nails in his coffin for some time," says one executive at Ford's Dearborn headquarters near Detroit.

Ford has suffered a startling reversal of fortunes in the past year. It has faced a furore over the $3 billion (€3.3 billion) recall of allegedly faulty tyres supplied by Firestone, part of Bridgestone of Japan.

The group has been forced to write down investments in internet projects, initiated largely by Mr Nasser. Its core US earnings have been hit by intense price competition and a challenge from Toyota and Nissan, among others, in the light trucks sector.

In the US, productivity and quality have suffered, while a management appraisal scheme introduced by Mr Nasser has been attacked as unfair.

In Europe, a restructuring has failed to reverse losses, which reached $3 billion last year. Contributions from luxury brands such as Volvo and Land Rover - two acquisitions championed by Mr Nasser - have failed to compensate for declining profits among its core Ford vehicles.

However, Mr Nasser's defenders say he was caught out by a confluence of market shifts and unfortunate events. Senior executives at rival companies say Mr Nasser cannot be blamed for the difficulties. They argue that Mr Ford, who now becomes chief executive as well as chairman, will find it hard to improve on Mr Nasser's record.

Mr Nasser's style of management did not help, however. He took pride in trying to change Ford's culture, implemented frequent management upheavals and upset the powerful United Auto Workers union. Some Ford executives say that this, rather than overall strategy, was the problem.

Some of Ford's problems were not his fault. Few car executives foresaw the strength of the challenge from Japanese and Korean manufacturers in the area from which they derived the lion's share of their profits: minivans, pick-up trucks and sports utility vehicles.

Senior Ford executives say that although its reputation among customers was damaged by the Firestone crisis, they would have been hard-pressed to have done better than Mr Nasser in handling it.

The central question now is whether the new management team led by Mr Ford and Sir Nick Scheele, elevated this week from head of North American operations to chief operating officer, can reverse Ford's decline.

Initial briefings from Ford executives suggested that the change would be one of style and sentiment rather than overall group strategy. That means the pair are likely to adopt a more consensual approach.

There were early signs of this. To applause at an employees' meeting in Detroit this week, Mr Ford told workers that the company was "bigger than any one person", after thanking Mr Nasser briefly for his 33 years of service. He said that the central task was "to ensure the ongoing success of Ford Motor Company, a company that people are proud to work for".

Mr Ford has shown a knack for public relations in the past by emphasising the need for the company to take environmental responsibilities seriously. He is at ease talking emotionally of the need for honesty and the importance of "bleeding Ford blue".

Such human skills go down well in Michigan, where Mr Nasser's emphasis on cost-cutting was unpopular. But there are few signs so far of a change in strategic direction. Mr Ford and his new chief operating officer are likely to push through the remedial action set in motion by Mr Nasser.

There will still be a restructuring of the North American operations, likely to be announced at the turn of the year, and the group will keep trying to work its way through an intense discounting battle in the US car market.

The new management must also reduce Ford's over-dependence on a relatively narrow product portfolio - as Mr Nasser tried and failed to do. In recent years, the carmaker has made much of its money from a small number of highly lucrative vehicles - notably in the North American truck and sports utility vehicle segments.

When industry conditions were buoyant in the mid to late 1990s, this was generally viewed as an advantage - as it provided efficiencies compared with GM's broader product line-up and overlapping brands.