Episode 50: Former Ford CEO Mark Fields on the Value of a Unified Vision

Joining Mik in this episode of Mik + One is Mark Fields, Senior Advisor to TPG Capital, a member of Planview's board of directors, and former CEO of Ford Motor Company. Mark has presided over three decades of strategic and digital transformations at global businesses and shares how he consistently succeeded with a focus on product. He discusses the value of possessing agility, a unified vision, and a rallying cry as a business to create a product that delivers more value and potentially diverts a company off more common value streams. 

In this episode, Mik and Mark also discuss drive-by-wire and how a point of view on what the future is, creates a demand for businesses to create organizational structure that can support strategy.

Key discussions include: 

Early steps in Mark’s career
Turning Mazda around in Japan
Functional divides between business, technology, and operations
Focusing on product is how you get customers
Unifying vision and having a rallying cry in a business
Turning products into platforms 
Diverting off common platforms to deliver customer missions
ECUs in vehicles and the cost
AWS and Azure bills for organizations
Ford’s Mach-E
Digital companies Mark is on the board of and how he is helping them thrive
Learnings and agility

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@mik_kersten #MikPlusOne

www.tasktop.com

Additional Resources:

Connect with Mark
Portfolio SAFe
Dean Leffingwell on the Mik + One Podcast: Part 1, Part 2
MarTech
Dave West - podcast episode
Scrum Studio
Greenfield project
Skunkworks
Bimodal IT
Agile Release Train
Mik + One Podcast Episode 20: Justin Watts

For more information about Mark Fields and to view the full list of resources mentioned in this episode, as well as download the transcript, visit:

https://projecttoproduct.org/podcast/mark-fields/