Mr. Mulally’s chief instrument here was data-driven management, in which each executive was responsible for consistently knowing and reporting how his — very few women appear in this story — department was performing. Concentrating on consistent metrics, he argued early on, would focus managerial attention on the big picture while increasing transparency.

He eliminated all corporate-level meetings except for two he introduced: the weekly, mandatory business plan review, when the senior team reported its progress on specific goals, and the special-attention review, when executives took up issues needing in-depth consideration. Over time, both meetings — which occurred daily in crucial periods — would become the highway on which Ford’s leaders drove change.

Before that, however, Mr. Mulally had to earn his senior colleagues’ trust. Early on, Mark Fields, head of the Americas business, tested the new chief. Mr. Fields wondered: Did Mr. Mulally really want business plan review meetings to be forums where problems as well as achievements were discussed? If so, then the gatherings ran counter to Ford’s culture, in which formal meetings were “political theater,” according to Mr. Hoffman, and side discussions were “where deals were cut and truths too painful to put in a PowerPoint presentation were shared.”

Mr. Fields told colleagues in a business plan review meeting that he was delaying a product introduction. (The vehicle had a possible problem: a test diver had noticed a grinding noise coming from the suspension.) Mr. Fields and some others around the table thought that he might be fired, the book says. Instead, Mr. Mulally started clapping, praising Mr. Fields’s willingness to report the delay. Two weeks later, other executives’ PowerPoint slides were filled with examples of specific problems in their departments.

The book says Mr. Mulally recalled this as a defining moment — when problems were all out in the open and the company could go about fixing them.

The second distinctive aspect of Ford’s turnaround was Mr. Mulally himself. No significant change of this type succeeds without a deft, committed, adaptable leader. In Mr. Hoffman’s occasionally hagiographic telling, Mr. Mulally was all this and more. Fueled by his drive to fix Ford, and by a rich compensation package and his own seemingly boundless energy, he attacked problems with data, carefully outlined organizational structures and specific rules of the road.