Jim Hackett, Ford Motor Company’s President and CEO since 2017, is retiring from the company. Chief Operating Officer Jim Farley has been tapped as his successor and will officially take the helm on October 1, according to a company news release.
Farley, who was also elected to the Ford board of directors, will be working closely with Hackett as he makes the transition over the next two months.
“My goal when I took on the CEO role was to prepare Ford to win in the future,” said Hackett. “The hardest thing for a proud, long-lived company to do is change to meet the challenges of the world it’s entering rather than the world it has known.”
Hackett said he has been working with Farley for the past three years, and said the COO was instrumental in crafting the company’s new product portfolio as well as redesigning its businesses around the world. They also worked on developing and executing Ford’s Creating Tomorrow Together plan — which aims to turn the company into a “higher-growth, higher-margin business.”
Farley joined Ford in 2007 as the global head of marketing and sales, and eventually led the Lincoln division for Ford South America, Ford of Europe, and all Ford global markets.
In 2019, he was selected to lead Ford’s New Businesses, Technology & Strategy team. In this role, he helped the OEM establish a way to capitalize on “powerful forces reshaping the industry” — things like software platforms, connectivity, artificial intelligence, automation, and more. Farley was named COO in February.
“Jim Hackett has laid the foundation for a really vibrant future and we have made tremendous progress in the past three years,” said Farley. “I am so excited to work together with the whole Ford team to realize the full potential of this great company in a new era.”
Hackett will continue on as a special advisor for Ford through March of 2021.
