Jim Farley is the guy who prefers to be dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, spending time in a garage wrenching on classic Mustangs and vintage motorcycles. He respects men and women who have oil-stained clothes, busted knuckles and grease under their nails. He appreciates people who do engine and body work themselves. It’s how he paid his way through school.

The son of a banker who expected his boy to find independence early, Farley at age 14 talked himself into a summer job rebuilding car engines in Southern California. And he’d sort old parts, like power steering pumps and brake shoes. When he saved up $500 to buy a black 1966 Mustang with a blown motor, he had the pony car towed to a work site and stayed in it for the rest of that summer.

“Kinda like a Johnny Cash song,” Farley said. “After work was done, I worked on my engine and I built it one part at a time.”

James D. "Jim" Farley Jr., 56, is not a senior executive who hangs out at the yacht club sipping martinis. A friend who loved racing left Farley a vintage car two decades ago after securing his promise to drive it. So Farley took lessons and now travels the world competing. He says there’s nothing like driving the Le Mans track in France at 2 a.m. in the rain.

“Properly tuned, my 1965 GT40 goes over 200 miles per hour,” he said. “When I get out of the car after a long hard race, you feel so calm and relaxed. It’s my yoga.”

This is the man assigned to guide Ford Motor Co. into the future.

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A grandfather's wish

No one could have predicted his path.

Well, maybe his grandfather.

By the time Farley was 5 years old, he was being groomed by his grandfather Emmet Tracy, an early employee of company founder Henry Ford, who went on to run an auto parts business and a car dealership in Grosse Pointe.

While other grandparents read Dr. Seuss, Tracy sat down with a stack of Automotive Newswhen his grandson visited during Christmas and summer breaks. The two would drive past the Packard Plant, the Ford Piquette Plant and the Rouge Plant, where Tracy worked.

“You’ve got to go to college because these are really tough jobs,” he told the child.

Even now, Farley said, he can picture his grandfather arriving at the factory with his lunch pail as one of the nameless, faceless workers who built Model T's.

After earning degrees in economics and computer science at Georgetown University and an MBA at UCLA in 1990, Farley scored job offers from Ford, General Motors and Toyota. At Ford, he would have concentrated on just one aspect of the F-Series truck. Toyota offered him the chance to focus on the whole car, specifically the launch of a new luxury brand no one had heard of — Lexus.

Detroit could wait.

And Lexus surged to dominance.

Meanwhile, Jim Farley paid a price privately.

Disapproval in Detroit

“I won’t go into it. But there were many, many, many tense moments for me,” Farley said. “My dad was a naval officer in World War II. Many of my relatives on my mom’s side here in Detroit, I think they were completely baffled by why I worked at Toyota. For my mom, she was so happy to see me come to Ford (in 2007). I myself was unaware of the social impact Toyota’s growth had in the U.S. on companies like Ford.”

He took chances at Toyota that paid off. Colleagues couldn’t believe when Farley requested assignment in Europe with no guarantees of a job when he returned two years later.

“He wanted all the challenges,” said Dave Danzer, one of Farley’s earliest bosses at Toyota. “He wanted to learn the dealer experience. He wanted to work on small cars, which is a big deal in Europe. He wanted to go to plants and experience manufacturing and assembly. Jim was highly motivated, not so much by money and I don’t think by titles.”

Toyota recruited product planners from Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, UCLA, Michigan and California, Berkeley. What set Farley apart were not his prestigious degrees, because everyone had those.

“He really loved cars — fast, beautiful, classic cars,” said Danzer, of Manhattan Beach, California, the retired group vice president, corporate planning for Toyota and Lexus in the U.S. and Mexico.

“He worked around the clock. He had a very strong work ethic or he wouldn’t have made it at Toyota. He was demanding on himself and his people. He was very respectful of the Japanese, and he earned their trust.”

Toyota emphasized sales and marketing, Danzer said. It knew its products were good and the team needed to get the word to consumers.

“We grew every month for 20 years at Toyota,” Farley said. "It was all about new opportunity, new growth, finding new products that didn’t exist in the market."

Meanwhile, Ford presented a stark contrast to Toyota.

"It was a new experience, consolidating and shrinking to grow the business, like we went through at Ford in 2007," Farley said, "and what we’re doing in Europe and South America now. We had to get the size and cost structure down to a point where it was healthy so we could grow again. Same thing we’re doing now.”

He spent three years in Europe implementing a turnaround plan for Ford, oversaw the multi-billion-dollar operation, and stopped the bleeding. From 2015-17 as president of Ford Europe, he executed a plan that led to record profitability, record margins and increased sales.

Since Farley's departure, conditions for Ford Europe have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The company has cut thousands of jobs amid uncertainty related to Brexit, the bungled British attempt to exit the European Union.

In his current role, Farley doesn’t oversee manufacturing or operations. That’s in the hands of Joe Hinrichs. Farley is leading Automotive 2.0, the Ford program for such things as autonomous vehicles and big data. He is the future.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett, 64, named his top two lieutenants on April 10. Either one is a potential successor.

Of the non-retiring top-paid Ford executives identified in 2018 regulatory filings, Farley has the second longest tenure; Hinrichs, 52, has been with the company longer than anyone not named Ford.

Watched in awe

After 12 years, Farley speaks ofhis former employer with admiration.

“Coming from Toyota, where we were always growing ... there was a paranoia for trying to do better," Farley said. "I feel that people are satisfied with just growth itself and improving profits. But I’ve learned that kaizen (Toyota's famed process for continuous improvement) means that even when things are going really well, that’s actually the most important time to feel like there’s more — more opportunity.”

Lifers at Ford say the company can be feudal. People complain that investing in political gamesmanship can garner favor that translates to job security.

At Toyota, Farley was labeled a rising star. He spent nearly two decades at the Japanese company as it relentlessly built its reputation, profit and market share. The Detroit Three watched in awe.

“In product planning, you have to make bets that aren’t clear to the competition and sometimes not even to the customers,” Farley explained. “You have to make choices to go to parts of the market that either don’t exist or are very underdeveloped. At the time, there may not be evidence of why to do that. But those that do get handsomely rewarded.”

'I couldn't care less about Detroit'

As a young product planner at Toyota, Farley spent nearly six months writing a paper of nearly 70 pages for a presentation.

“My boss was like, 'Farley, what is this?' ” he recalled, laughing.

Danzer, who worked at General Motors before Toyota, said he can't forget the epic Lexus product proposal created by Farley, even after all these years.

“He gave me 'Moby Dick' and I was expecting CliffsNotes. I just wanted a crisp and concise recommendation," Danzer said. "I worked 16 years for Chevrolet and General Motors. Everybody got into the habit of how big the words are that you use, how pretty it looked, like things were made for publication. At Toyota, you have half an hour to sell an idea, and that's including intense Q&A: Here’s the issue. Here’s the impact on us. Here are three ways we can go, and then the pros and cons. Here's the recommendation with charts, graphs and bullet points. Usually four pages or less, no big words.”

Farley went on to play key roles in developing the Lexus luxury brand, launching the Toyota Scion to connect with young drivers and unveiling the Toyota Tundra pickup in an audacious effort to challenge Ford and Chevy.

When Detroit critics questioned his debuting products at nightclubs and underground art venues in 2003, the New York Times quoted Farley saying, “I couldn’t care less about Detroit.”

He predicted that one day Detroit would follow his lead.

“Toyota was my life,” Farley said. “These were my friends.”

Life stopped

By 2006, Ford was looking for new blood and new direction. Bill Ford Jr. hired Alan Mulally from Boeing to guide the company. Mulally, who drove a Lexus when he came to Detroit, publicly declared that he would benchmark Ford against Toyota. Soon, getting Farley onto the team would become part of the strategy.

In fall 2007, Farley and the Ford CEO met in a lobby of a private hangar at Los Angeles International Airport.

“I watched Jim get out of his car,” Mulally told the New York Times. “I remember his hello, his eye contact, his questions, how articulate and genuine he was. I knew right then this was the person I wanted.”

The talks went well. And then tragedy struck. The plan was put on hold.

Lia Farley gave birth to twins prematurely and, after complications, the infants died.

Life came to a screeching halt.

After weeks of reflection, Jim Farley chose Detroit.

He left a thriving, healthy company to join a rescue squad.

In his first meetings with Ford, upon arrival from California, he spoke in brutal realities. The economy was tanking.

“I don’t have much time,” Farley told Automotive News in November 2007 as Ford's new marketing chief. “I’m here to break through the clutter in a very honest way and tell U.S. customers, in any way you can, you’ve got to look at Ford.”

Looking back, Farley says that people misunderstood impatience for anger.

“I was brought from another company because of my experience,” he told the Free Press in May 2019. “My value was to change the product. There were some people who thought they should be in the job I was in, or maybe felt like we needed more time to study things in ’08. We didn’t have time. We were out of time.”

He paused. “How do you put it? When you’re the person who gets off the train in the Wild West, the guy with the black hat on who’s hired to deal with the bad actor in town, there’s a piece to it that isn’t democratic.”

The culture contrast between Ford and Toyota was profound. Toyota was stable while Ford was cutting jobs, closing factories and selling off assets.

'Shocked'

Mulally was the only auto CEO in Detroit who managed to avoid bankruptcy during the economic collapse. He famously mortgaged everything, even the Blue Oval logo, and put together a plan.

While rivals GM and Chrysler were mandated by the government to overhaul cost structure and operations, Ford had to execute through internal struggle.

Remember, Mulally was a leader who shocked the Motor City when he confessed in September 2006 to driving a Lexus because it was “the finest car in the world," wrote Free Press columnist Tom Walsh at the time. Mulally "knows Lexus cars are better than anything currently in Ford's lineup, and he doesn't care if Ford employees or the media hear him say it out loud."

That is the bold leadership Farley joined.

Mulally created a new position for Farley, making him the first vice president of marketing and communication at Ford.

'A big, huge hairy idea'

Today, some Ford employees complain Farley refuses to assimilate to the company culture. They don't like that he doesn't really “blend.” But Farley wasn’t hired to blend. He was recruited from a championship team to work magic. He still has harsh critics.

After Farley was promoted in April to president of new business, technology and strategy, Peter DeLorenzo wrote on Autoextremist.com that “Ford’s chief bad actor and enfant terrible’ was “clearly being moved off to the side.”

The blogger, who consulted for Ford until Farley decided not to renew the contract, referred to Farley in October 2018 as “Jim ‘I’m a genius, just ask me’ Farley, Ford’s self-appointed all-knowing — and all-tedious — marketing guru."

But many people who work with Farley say he is a genius. Even some skeptics within the company said Farley gets the job done without fail. And he's tireless.

“He’s very, very intense,” said Janet Lawson, who was with the Ford Fund. “Sometimes people are needy, I think. They need those pats on the back to say, ‘You like what I’m saying, right?’ If they don’t get those attaboys from him, they take it personally. Jim is not thinking about that. He’s 30,000 feet above sea level. He doesn’t think in straight lines. He thinks in spirals. I would want my tomorrow in Jim Farley’s hands. He is wicked smart.”

Upon arriving in Detroit more than a decade ago, Farley and Lawson have crossed paths through volunteer work.

“He knows who he is and what he’s about," Lawson said. "If people don’t understand him, I could see how they might feel threatened. People like the status quo. Jim is an interrupter. He’s not afraid of a big, huge hairy idea and not afraid to make it happen. He’s just never afraid. And he’s a perfectionist. It’s intimidating to other people who don’t work that hard.”

Bill Ford was quoted in the New York Times in April 2008, saying, “Intense is a good description of Jim, incredibly intense. He feels everything.”

Fewer f-bombs

Kenneth Williams, an autonomous vehicle digital experience manager, works with Farley now.

“He is very direct and focused on outcomes,” Williams said. “What you notice in a lot of leadership is they tend to not want to make that decision as quickly. If you send material before a meeting, Jim will read it and jump right to pages that matter. It’s refreshing. He gets it: Let’s just do what we need to do. He’s not stuck in process. Sometimes he’ll cut you off, because it’s not about having hours of dialogue. It’s about getting to the answer.”

Farley has earned a reputation over the years as someone with a temper. Others say he’s simply passionate. He doesn’t drop the f-bomb like he used to. He is older now.

“He’s a guy in a position that has to make tough calls, not where you’re making friends,” said Robbie Buhl, 55, a former IndyCar driver and friend since childhood. “If Ford is going to be around and thriving in five years, the culture has got to change. If it doesn’t change, the company won’t be around.”

Buhl, whose family members were mayors of Detroit in the 1800s, refurbished the Corktown site that houses Ford workers known as Team Edison.

“Jim would be a tough guy to work for because he’s so demanding. He’s a workaholic and he’s bright,” Buhl said. “I’m not a gushy lovey type person with friends, family or anybody. So you can qualify that how you want. But he’s got to figure out what the new world is, how things are going to happen in this world of electrification and mobility and whatever that is.”

Detroit versus Silicon Valley

Farley is known to reach out at the end of the day or write private notes after a project to acknowledge he pushed everyone hard but wanted to say thanks, said Ford employees.

“Jim is not a typical executive. He’s definitely a provocative leader. He pushes, he makes you think,” said Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, who recently returned to Ford after a stint with Uber. “Projecting the future no one knows is something Jim is really good at.”

Having worked briefly at Uber, Marakby recognizes qualities in Farley that people in Detroit find unusual.

“In Silicon Valley, people are more blunt, more direct, and people don’t take it personally,” Marakby said. “I had to adjust to that, too, when I was there. At the same time, you know where people are coming from and it doesn’t bother you. If you come to a culture of an industry company, and try to do that, people see it as different.”

'Hard to bluff'

Farley enjoys dropping interesting nuggets, like autonomous vehicles are so common in Pittsburgh that people don’t even notice anymore.

Plain talk is comforting to many of the 3,000 Ford dealers who watch to see what the future will bring, said Charlie Gilchrist, who lives in Weatherford, Texas, and runs eight dealerships.

“There were a lot of things dealers had to do to help Ford survive. Hard decisions. Those were rough times,” he said of the Great Recession. “It thrilled us to have someone like Jim.”

When dealers hated ads, they told Farley. When dealers attacked Ford’s credibility in the marketplace, Farley listened. And then he would do things like take engineers to dealerships to show farmers about the soybean-based foam-filled car seats. He wanted to instill confidence and enthusiasm.

“Jim wants to know the truth. He wants to know what you feel,” Gilchrist said. “He wants results. You can call him and he’ll be in another part of the world and answer his phone or call you back. And he always answers your question with a question.”

The style is imported from Toyota. Colleagues say the team is taught never to just accept an answer but to drill down for more. If you say dealers can sell a product for a certain price, Toyota wants to know how many dealers, where they’re based and how their opinions compare to dealers elsewhere.

“It’s hard to bluff a good Japanese businessman,” Danzer said.

Mopping, scrubbing

A Ford employee who heard a piece was being written about Farley reached out and said, “Please remember that Jim Farley is a real guy.”

It seems, as public as he is, few really know him.

He shows up at 6 a.m. on Saturdays every once in awhile to serve meals at the Pope Francis Center. Or mop the floor. Or scrub the kitchen stove. Or staff the front desk when people come for showers.

“He just wants to be an average Joe helping to serve the vulnerable,” said Father Tim McCabe, executive director of the shelter formerly known as the warming center of Saints Peter and Paul Jesuit Church. "His grandfather used to bring him down when he was little. Now Jim brings his children.”

On his first day serving meals, two men started shouting and swearing. The priest was trying to get the situation under control.

“He saw I was embarrassed and said, 'Don’t worry. That happens at Ford all the time,' " Father Tim recalled Farley saying. “Jim just always puts people at ease. He sees people who struggle with maintaining any kind of sense of reality because of mental illness, like hearing voices and talking to people who aren’t there. These are people who are deeply wounded by their lives. Jim is someone who understands struggle."

Saying goodbye to Chris Farley

Jim Farley isn't without regret.

When he took the job with Toyota, he moved to Torrance and left his cousin Chris Farley behind in LA. That same year, Chris Farley joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live" on NBC. He had sought treatment for drug and alcohol addiction throughout his adult life, and Jim Farley tried to protect the family member who made everyone laugh. Between 1990 and 1997, the comedian surged to stardom with TV and film roles. He died at 33.

The auto executive talks privately of guilt mixed with sadness and wonders whether being closer to his cousin all those years ago, and spending more time together, could have saved his life.

“When I was younger, I was so happy for Chris. We were all happy for Chris in our big, large Irish family. At reunions, Chris was always the star. A lot of other people found that out through 'Saturday Night Live,'” Jim Farley said.

“When he passed away, it was very sad for all of us on a personal level. People would bring it up, and say he was great, but it was a lot of conflicting emotions. I lived in Los Angeles when Chris was doing events and movies. I’d see a lot of Chris. He was going through fame, dealing with being a Wisconsin boy exposed to so much. I’m not just a fan, I’m family. So I’m caring for him, and making sure he was OK. Time heals things. I remember meeting Marino Franchitti, a famous race car driver, and he said, 'Tommy Boy’s my favorite movie.' ”

Tommy is the name of Jim Farley’s uncle.

“Chris’ humor, in many ways, came from his dad, my father’s brother,” Jim Farley said. “They loved old movies. I remember hearing so many times Chris talk to his dad about a character he was thinking about, like from old movies. My dad was a senior banker with Citibank. He was very proud of his profession.

"He lived in South America for 20 years and spoke fluent Spanish. My dad joined the Navy to see the world after he left Wisconsin for Georgetown, and never really came back. He lived in Montreal, New York City. My dad was very dapper, a big city guy. But my uncle graduated from Georgetown, as well, and went back to Wisconsin and started an asphalt company — the premise of 'Tommy Boy' was about Chris’ life with his dad, traveling Wisconsin and selling to local farmers who happened to be county road commissioners on the side.”

Asked about his childhood, Jim Farley stops for a minute to think. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and spent his early years there. Later, his family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. His parents met in Grosse Pointe. And his mother always considered herself "a Detroit girl," so happy to come home to friends and family.

“Mom drove one of those monstrous wood-paneled station wagons where we sat in the back facing each other,” he said. "Every summer we’d travel cross-country and go up to northern Michigan. These are my fondest memories.”

Harsh feedback, tears

Building relationships, and investing in them, matters to Farley.

Lee Jelenic, 39, of Birmingham surprised friends at Wharton when he chose Ford Motor Co. over Wall Street a decade ago. One factor was the chance to work with Farley.

“I think for a long time he was a misunderstood leader. We've all evolved,” said Jelenic, who recently left Ford to become a chief innovation officer outside the auto industry. “Jim would just call from Europe and offer thoughts with every new job I had. He demands a lot of his team and himself. He pushed me to go faster and think bigger.”

After Jelenic packed to go, he requested a final meeting with Farley and described becoming overwhelmed with emotion.

“He was always trying to make me better,” Jelenic said. “Early on, he would say, ‘You talk too much.’ And I did. I needed to get the point. I started as an intern and left as a CEO of Ford Commercial Solutions. It’s easy to pat everyone on the back. He gave harsh, honest feedback. He demands perfection. And he is brilliant.”

Jelenic said it was Farley's leadership in digital media that unleashed the Fiesta Movement, the insane idea of giving to 100 millennial drivers the keys to Ford Fiestas, then asking the drivers to post on social media about their experiences. “It was a big risk. They could’ve said whatever they wanted,” Jelenic said. “His vision is always to push to do something different. We used the voice of the customer."

The Harvard Business Review credited Farley's direction on the "sensational" strategy, which attracted more than 6.5 million views on YouTube and thousands in immediate car sales for Ford at very little cost.

No cigars

These days, Farley lives alone in an apartment near Campus Martius in downtown Detroit. His family is based in London. His travel is so extensive that they could be living anywhere. The Detroit apartment is filled with images of old cars and motorcycles and stacks and stacks of books. After living there 1½ years, he has read about 70 books, and just replaces the finished one with something new each time.

“Not one of them is a business book,” Farley said. “I’m reading one now about the history of our country. Before that? How to raise your daughters. The one before that was a submarine technology book. Every one of these helps me think about my job. I process what to do at work while I read.”

Times have changed in the auto industry.

Back when a cigar-smoking executive lived in Bloomfield Hills and dreamed up the next fin size and design, well, those days are done, Farley said.

He feels like he’s a product planner all over again.

“In 1988, there was an emerging segment called crossovers and there were no crossovers. There was a Suzuki sidekick and a couple Jeep products,” he said. “No one dreamed up a thing like a crossover, which was taking a car platform like a Camry, raise it up, improve the interior for the same overall length that’s easier to get in and out of, because the hip point to the seat was more natural to the standing position of a human. Get a higher drive position, so you can look over the sedans. Now it’s the main body style in our industry 20 years later.”

As for the future, Farley says old cars versus autonomous vehicles presents a false choice. He sees driverless cars as important for commuters who lack mass transit, single parents who can’t leave work to drive children to their lessons, older people needing to get to medical appointments and people who want their freedom but can’t drive.

“AV tech will change lives,” he said. "I remember my dad was the captain of his Lincoln ship. There came a time it just wasn’t safe. I remember the look on this face, you can’t do this. It’s not fair. “

Family struggle has shaped Farley, who described his younger brother in Ann Arbor as a wonderful man with a medical condition that has required him to live in a hospital for long periods.

“He has never driven. He will never be able to drive. An automated vehicle will change his life,” Farley said. “My sister is an orthopedic surgeon because of him. He went through so much as a child. And he never complains. When people say ‘Jim’s rather intense,’ if they could see me around my brother or family, I think they’d feel differently.”

'Dirt poor'

If he wasn’t working for a global corporation, Farley said he would be working on old cars somewhere. He speaks enough Japanese, Spanish and French to get by. He is glad he worked as a janitor at the start of his two-year stint at a restoration shop run by the famous Phil Hill in Santa Monica.

“We took cars that were pieces and created masterpieces,” Farley said. “These were vehicles from the 1920s and 1930s. They were owned by the shah of Iran and the maharishis of India. Phil Hill was the first American to win the Formula One championship. He loved opera, he spoke fluent Italian and he was a car whisperer. And I was dirt poor putting myself through grad school.”

Farley added, “When I meet with my designers now, I think of people like Phil Hill. They can’t even express why they think something looks beautiful but they can create it. You have to let people like that do their job. You can’t overthink it.”

All these years later, his childhood shapes the present.

At the end of his summer job working on cars in California, Farley's parents sent him an airplane ticket to go home. So he traded the ticket for gas money and drove his black Mustang cross-country with no spare tire — “I couldn’t afford that” — and a case of Coca-Cola.

“Unfortunately, I had to stop pretty often to go to the bathroom. When I showed up in northern Michigan … my dad was like, 'what are you doing here?' I said, 'I drove.' He said, ‘drove what?’ I said, ‘I drove my car.’ They weren’t very pleased.”

Hundreds in the crowd at the Automotive News World Congress during the Detroit auto show cheered the story on that January night. He didn't even have a driver's permit.

“But I never got stopped. I met the most fascinating people. I got terrible gas mileage in Vegas. I went to a gas station, was running out of money, a guy helped me tune it up in the back of his gas station. My lights went out in the middle of the desert. It was an awesome trip.”

Hundreds in a ballroom at the Marriott cheered again.

Outside the spotlight, Farley walks parking lots and eavesdrops on people to better understand the way they live. When other car companies are testing autonomy, Farley is urging his team to listen to what people need in their daily routine.

'What are you doing?'

“It’s kind of funny, my dad used to get mad at me for watching racing. He was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, “I’m watching the Daytona 500.’ He’s like, 'That’s a waste of time.' I said, 'Not to me.' "

Thing is, racing isn’t about who can go the fastest. Racing is an analytical process if you understand how it works, Buhl said. “If you want to be good at it, there are formulas." You need to know the radius through a corner to know how fast to go. There’s a lot more to racing cars than who can hold the gas (pedal) down the longest.”

Attention to detail is Farley's money key.

“Jim is an American muscle car guy," Buhl said. "His new role is very challenging. I’m not sure I’d want to try and figure out how to make money and thrive in the new world of automobiles."

Don't worry, Farley said. There's no fighting technology, and no reason to be afraid.

“I’m really focused on making change that matters and change is difficult," Farley said. "But for me, it’s why I get up in the morning.”

Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-222-6512 orphoward@freepress.com.Follow her on Twitter@phoebesaid. Read more on Ford and sign up for our autos newsletter.