Alexander Trotman, Baron Trotman

Alexander James Trotman, Baron Trotman ( born July 22, 1933, Isleworth, Middlesex, England; † April 25, 2005 in Northallerton, Yorkshire ) was a British- American manager and CEO of Ford

Curriculum vitae

Alexander James Trotman was born in England, the son of an upholsterer in simple conditions; during the Blitz, his family moved from Greater London to Scotland. With a scholarship he attended Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of East London; later he graduated from the U.S. Michigan State University's Master in Business Administration.

Trotman served in the Royal Air Force before he began in 1955 to work at Ford in the UK as a management trainee. He was involved in the development of the Ford Cortina, which is why Henry Ford II was aware of him. In 1969 he went to Ford to Detroit. In 1984 he became head of Ford in Europe, in 1989 the head of Ford in North America and 1993 CEO of the entire company until after 43 years working for Ford resigned from his post in 1998. He was the first Ford boss who was not from the U.S.. In 1988 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1996 and knighted in 1999 raised to the life peer as Baron Trotman of Osmotherley in the County of North Yorkshire.

After his resignation to Trotman retired to a cottage to Yorkshire, where he died after a brief illness in 2005. He described himself as Atlantic person: He had dual British and American nationality and spoke with a Scottish accent.

Activity at Ford

Two years before Trotman took up his post as CEO, Ford had suffered the biggest loss in its history in the amount of 7.4 billion dollars. Trotmans task is to address this deficit with a rigorous austerity program and restructuring within the group was. So he installed the program " Ford 2000 ", which meant that the world unified vehicle types were produced in all Ford plants, and he introduced a rotation for the top managers. Moreover, the production of vehicle parts was outsourced and it also established his own company, the supplier Visteon, like other suppliers had to compete for contracts themselves. This led to a fierce price war among the supplier companies. This reach savings of around five billion dollars.

Trotman also centralized the design and engineering departments of the company. In Europe, small and medium-sized cars were developed in North America, the larger vehicles and light trucks and Geländelimousen (SUV ). The concept was also that externally different models were built on identical basic structures. In this way Trotman led the group back into the profit zone. It was also shown that the models Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique, which were built based on the European Ford Mondeo, were not particularly popular in the United States. In 1996, he led Ford back into Formula 1.

Ultimately, Ford introduced in 2000 to problems within the company, so that Trotman a year before his contract expired, resigned. His successor as CEO, William Clay Ford Junior.