Ford Not Bullish On Taurus Book

In her book Car: A Drama in the American Workplace, released this month, Walton includes details both flattering and critical about her experience with the Taurus design team. Much to Ford's dismay. It turns out the auto giant had ushered inan outsider with the rather innocent presumption that she would write a corporate-sponsored review, not an independent critique.

A critique that was completed despite Ford's efforts to stop it.

"Ford was kind of naive in a way," she says. "They never thought about what happens when you let a real reporter in the door."

Walton is a real reporter, a 20-year veteran of the Philadelphia Inquirer who didn't cut any corners in researching her book. The author joined the Taurus team for nearly three years, making 50 trips to Detroit as Ford redesigned, engineeredand marketed the 1996 model of what had been the best-selling car in America.

Walton had approached Ford in 1993 with her idea of telling how a car is born, and Ford offered her the Taurus tale.

"They were very proud of what they were doing and eager to have someone write about the new things they were trying," she says. "I knew it would be a pretty dramatic story, involving millions of dollars and thousands of people. Theredesign was a really high-stakes gamble."

In the end, Ford lost two bets: that the overhauled Taurus would beat the rival Toyota Camry, and that Walton's view of the company would parallel their own.

Car displays Ford as is and describes some of its debacles in depth. Like this one: the company had, in the past, designed its own seats and hired others to manufacture them. But with the Taurus, Ford decided to get out of the seat businessentirely and gave a mega-million-dollar contract to a seat manufacturer who had never designed them before. The resulting seats, Walton says, were terrible: ratchets didn't work and colors didn't match. Ford worsened the situation by giving thecontract for the power-seat mechanism to the seat designer's arch competitor; the two companies barely talked to each other.

From the outset, Walton had agreed that Ford could review the manuscript for proprietary information, such as financial data that they wanted to keep from competitors. But the deal did not give the auto manufacturer a right of final approval. "Iknew when it went to Ford PR that there would be parts of the book that they didn't like," she says. "No company likes to publicize their problems, and Ford isn't any different."

When Ford read the manuscript, Walton says, "They went through the roof. I suspect now that they had expected a whitewash. All around, the car industry gets kid-glove treatment from the press, especially the car-buff magazines like MotorTrend and Road & Track."

Walton adds that the car company anticipated she would be unerringly pro-Ford because she had written two books on W. Edwards Deming, pioneer of the business "quality" philosophy and something of a hero in American manufacturing, in whosecompany she had previously visited the Motor City magnates.

Patty Chang Anker of W.W. Norton & Company, the book's publisher, says that Ford has made no secret of its disappointment.

"It was tough for Ford to accept, because Mary had been going there for years," she says. "I really think they didn't expect it, and that a lot of higher-ups regret having granted her that much access."

Ford's response, not surprisingly, was to criticize the book for focusing on conflicts (i.e., the bad), rather than collaboration (i.e., the good). The company also ordered its Taurus team to stop speaking with Walton and pressured her to revise thebook.

To little avail.

"I had kept out most of the sensitive information anyway, so there were only a few points that I was required to change," Walton says. She did agree, though, to remove or alter several quotations that could get their speakers in trouble orthat her publisher thought might be libelous.

Walton considers Car a fair portrayal of Ford. She says, "What they call conflicts, I call good stories. I chose to write about those things that readers would be interested in. It's a story of conflict, but it's also emotional becausepeople at Ford care a lot about what they do."

She also says that her relationship with Ford is still cordial, and that not everyone there hates the book.

"People tend to speak of Ford as a monolith, but several people think the book is terrific. Some members of the design team said to me, 'Hurrah, you told it like it was.'"

James Healey, chief auto reporter at USA Today, likes the fact that Walton doesn't overlook the dents in Ford.

"It frustrates me that higher standards aren't applied to the auto industry," he says. "Reporters don't go after car manufacturers like they do politicians."

Walton, too, believes in the journalistic tradition of reporter-as-watchdog.

"Auto manufacturers make decisions every day that hit people in the pocketbook and that affect safety and the environment," she says. "Those decisions are made by people over whom we have no influence. We don't elect them likegovernment officials. It's important for the press to hold car companies accountable for those decisions."

— Jennifer Rauch