J.D. — thanks for doing this. I hope you were as impressed with Alan as I con­tinue to be on a daily basis.

Nat­u­rally, the CEO doesn’t have the ground-level insight of the specifics of our social media activ­i­ties, but Alan is the kind of guy who “gets it.” He under­stands the impor­tance of per­sonal inter­ac­tion, and he reflects it in his own behav­iors around the com­pany. He sends per­sonal notes to employ­ees and per­son­ally responds to his email. And he’s a gen­uinely nice guy who’s very easy to talk with.

While crowd­sourc­ing the devel­op­ment of a car is a dan­ger­ous prospect (remem­ber the car Homer Simp­son designed? ), the point is that we don’t do so in a vac­uum. We are com­mit­ted to mak­ing cars that peo­ple want and value, and we can only do that through interaction.

I hope this gives peo­ple a sense of the excite­ment we’ve got at Ford.

Scott Monty
Global Dig­i­tal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions
Ford Motor Company

What a great inter­view, Chris and JD! So glad you had a chance to sit down with him.

Mulally seems to be the right guy for the job. Ford has made a lot of good moves over the past few years and is now well posi­tioned to com­pete. Ford has a lot to be proud of and they should blow their own horn, thank God the Crown Vic is dead and I won’t see it at any Hertz loca­tions again. North Amer­ica has as much tal­ent as any­one. I hope the unions can begin to see the light so we can finally end this us ver­sus them men­tal­ity. If unions need things like job clas­si­fi­ca­tions then they have no value, to NA economy.

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