I remember my first trip to Michigan in 2012. I was covering the Ford Motor Co.’s annual Trend Conference and had the opportunity to meet Alan Mulally, who gave a compelling presentation explaining the vision, strategy, and implementation of the One Ford plan. I was impressed more with the man than the plan. At the time, I knew nothing about Mark Fields.

I did not know, for instance, that the One Ford plan was initially developed by Fields. I did not know that Fields was president of the Ford Americas Division and that he would be tapped as Ford’s Chief Operations Officer in a matter of months. And I certainly did not know that Ford considered Mark Fields and Alan Mulally largely responsible for resurrecting the company from, as a Ford blog post from around that time says, “Decades of poor performance and lackluster design that had plagued Ford since the late ‘80s.”

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