Ford Motor Co. this week tapped Jim Hackett—a former office furniture chief executive who has been running its ride- and vehicle-sharing division since March 2016—to assume leadership of the company.

Hackett’s assignment: to transform the 114-year-old automaker from a company that designs and sells vehicles driven by their owners into one that makes autonomous vehicles (see “What to Know Before You Get In a Self-Driving Car”). He quickly got to work announcing a series of executive shifts, including the return of Sherif Marakby, who had left the car maker for Uber last year, to oversee Ford's self-driving and electric car businesses.

Today carmakers sell to individual drivers through an extensive network of dealers, which makes profits both selling and servicing cars. In a world of self-driving vehicles, individuals could stop buying cars, and instead use fleets owned and operated by a third party. Ford and its competitors could become the manufacturer and third-party owner, a seller of rides as well as vehicles.

Hackett, 62, lands the job right as the auto industry seems on the verge of a cyclical downturn in sales following six straight years of unit-sales increases, and following several years of poor stock performance for the company. Unlike the man he is replacing—Mark Fields, a 28-year Ford veteran who guided the automaker for less than three years—Hackett does not have a conventional résumé for an auto industry chief executive. He is best known for running Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Steelcase Inc., once a maker of desks and filing cabinets. He gained a reputation in Silicon Valley as a creative thinker skilled at leading comprehensive organizational change, and attracted the attention of Bill Ford Jr., the automaker’s executive chairman. After Steelcase he spent 17 months as interim athletic director at the University of Michigan—where he had played football under the legendary Bo Schembechler—overhauling a struggling football program.

Though driverless technology is under Ford research and development and the direction of Ken Washington, Ford’s new chief technical officer, during Hackett’s time as chairman of the mobility business he became more familiar with the technological challenges of automated driving. In February, he praised Ford’s commitment to acquire and invest $1 billion over the next five years in Argo.ai, a small artificial intelligence startup created by former leaders in driverless tech at Uber and Google.