He performed magic at Mazda, but can Mark Fields turn out premium profits from Ford's luxury brands?
On the table in Mark Fields' spacious corner office in London's Soho, next to a wooden duck of uncertain origin, sit three model cars and a yacht catalogue.
The scaled-down Mazda, Range Rover and a tiger-striped 1949 Ford represent the past, present and probable future of Fields, 43, the youngest of three executive vice-presidents at Ford and a candidate for chief executive one day.
He is one of Ford's turnround specialists. After running the Argentinian operations during the emerging markets crisis of 1997-98, he was sent to Mazda, Ford's Japanese affiliate, where he oversaw the rebuilding of the brand, cut costs and brought some stability to top management. "I've never gone with the flow of what was popular in terms of taking jobs or assignments," he says.
However, Fields now faces his toughest challenge yet, running the luxury car division and Ford's troubled European operations.
When he took over the London-based Premier Automotive Group two years ago this month, Jaguar was well on its way to losing $1 billion in the year, due to the late arrival of the top-of-the-range aluminium XJ saloon.
After he had been appointed, but before he started, the long-awaited F-type sports car was scuppered to save cash. As a marketing specialist who started out selling computers at IBM, he was also looked at askance by the engineers in charge of the luxury brands, which include Sweden's Volvo and Britain's Aston Martin and Land Rover. Last week Jaguar lost its way again, dragging the luxury division to a second-quarter loss of $362 million. The blame was put on exchange rates and Jaguar's poor performance in the US, where its cars are being discounted more heavily than any upmarket competitors.
As he tries to come up with a new business model to put Jaguar back on the road, Fields is also trying to cajole Land Rover workers into changing cherished working practices. The workers have finally agreed to look for quality and productivity improvements after he moved production of the biggest-selling model to another factory, and threatened to close the brand's Solihull home.
But the real test of his management skills - honed at Harvard Business School - is whether he can convince fiercely loyal petrolheads in his companies to co-operate with the other brands without losing their identities.
"They bleed Jaguar green or Volvo blue, and I don't want to snuff that out," he said. "But we have to go from working as a federation of states to marching together."
Persuading engineers to use parts they didn't design is tough, as GM is finding at loss-making Saab. It could be made tougher still by Mark Fields' lack of engineering or design training.
Yet the smooth-talking Mr Fields has convinced colleagues once before. When he took on the top job at Mazda as a rare westerner with a senior post in a big Japanese company, one Tokyo-based analyst wrote that his appointment showed "how little respect Ford has for Mazda". "I was a young American and always the first question was: 'You're only 38-years-old, why should you have this job?'" he says.
He responded with his typical confidence, pinned the analyst's note to his office wall and carried on with the cost-cutting and investment in new vehicle development.
In Britain, the fruits of product development under Field's predecessor as PAG chief, Wolfgang Reitzle, are finally going on sale, with more new models from Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston than ever before.
Fields has to rely on engineering and product development specialists, but he hopes to bring more to the company than his push for cost savings from sharing components, purchasing and technology.
"I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to be able to go and look at a body in white [an unpainted car body] and say: 'Oh, you're going to have crash problems with the front of the vehicle.' But I can take a customer viewpoint."
This is where the yacht catalogue lying on the desk comes in. It features sailing boats costing more to rent for a week than the price of a new car and, according to Fields, represents some of the competition for the luxury brands.
"In the luxury end of the business we are selling not only cars, we are selling a lifestyle," he says. If he is to win another rapid promotion, he will have to convince well-off drivers that buying a new Jaguar is a better use of money than a week's sailing in the Caribbean. - Financial Times