THE FORD IN FORD'S FUTURE

By RON STODGHILL II/DETROIT

Amid the pandemonium of 80,000 roaring Detroit Lions fans, William Clay Ford Jr. anxiously strides the freshly chalked sidelines of the Silverdome. A lanky 40-year-old with boyish features, Ford looks a tad out of his element on this turf of cleated gladiators. But it's clear during the season opener against the Atlanta Falcons that the man known as Bill Jr. feels right at home. As the Lions star running back Barry Sanders lopes out onto the field, Ford reaches out for an exuberant high five and pumps his fist in the air triumphantly. "I love game day," he says.

High-fiving football legends is the perquisite of rich guys like Ford, who can afford to play with toys such as the Lions, where he is vice chairman of the family-owned franchise. But Bill Jr.'s sporting days may be coming to an end. The Fords are, after all, a clan of industrialists. And company insiders have told TIME that the board of directors will soon name Bill Jr. to succeed Alex Trotman as chairman at the end of 1999, when Trotman retires. Although naming a Ford to head the company sounds like a nonevent--the family still controls 40% of the automaker's voting shares--intrigue at the top is not unusual at Ford. And no one named Ford has run the company since Henry II retired in 1980.

Quarterbacking a company as large and complex as Ford might seem out of Bill Jr.'s league. His tour through the automaker's ranks has been much abbreviated, and while his track record as a manager is solid, it probably wouldn't merit such a promotion were his last name not Ford. But Bill Jr. won't be alone at the top. According to executives familiar with the situation, the board will also make Jacques Nasser, now president of automotive operations, the next ceo. It's a plan that balances the long-term interests of the Ford family and the more short-term ones of Wall Street. Bill Jr. declined to comment on his future but told TIME, "The two of us together would be natural. Jacques and I are very good friends. It doesn't have to be one of us or the other running the company."

The two will have to travel far to top Trotman, a forward-thinking executive who launched the company on an ambitious global reorganization known as Ford 2000. Ford is a dead cinch to turn in record earnings this year. In the third quarter, profits climbed 64%, to $1.13 billion, and so far through the first nine months of 1997, the automaker has earned more than $5.1 billion on revenues of $112 billion. "Overall, the company is in good shape," says John Casesa, an analyst with Schroder Wertheim in New York City. "The family is happy with what it sees. The company is flush with cash, and there is a feeling that Ford is starting to reassert its leadership in the industry."

While the 49-year-old Nasser's aggressive cost-cutting initiatives have made him a darling of Wall Street, the Ford family believes it is critical to have one of their own at the helm to ensure that the company pursues markets and strategies that may not yield a swift payoff but are necessary for remaining competitive long after earnings statements are released. As Bill Jr. puts it, "A Ford has the luxury of managing for the long term."

For years, many believed William Clay Ford Jr. to be predestined to reign behind Ford's trademark blue oval nameplate. Genteel, analytical and quietly shrewd, he's a Civil War buff with degrees from Princeton and M.I.T. He joined Ford in 1979 and performed admirably in numerous executive posts, from assembly to product planning to chairman of Ford Switzerland. But in 1994, when he was named chairman of the automaker's powerful finance committee (which oversees the purse strings), his ascension seemed more certain. That promotion required him to resign his operating role within the company, prompting his move to the Lions, headed by his father William Clay Ford Sr.--also a former Ford executive and finance-committee chairman.

Bill Jr.'s decision two years ago to take over the family's small business, the lowly Lions, may have led to his taking over the big one. For one thing, he proved that his reputation for being overly diplomatic--read mousy--was undeserved. He not only restructured the Lions operation but in doing so took on the NFL owners, an intractable billionaire boys' club.

Sporting a pair of black alligator cowboy boots, he's talking tougher, negotiating harder and mincing words less than ever during frequent rants about an industry he says is desperately out of touch with its core consumer. "A lot of these owners have big egos," Ford says. "They like to talk, but few of them like to listen. But they should, because pro sports is in serious danger of alienating the average fan."

At Ford's first NFL team owners' meeting in 1995, the opening issue of business was whether the league should take away the Lions' annual Thanksgiving game and give it to a better team. But Ford made a goal-line stand. "This game doesn't belong to you or to us," he fumed. "It belongs to the fans who've been watching it since 1934--which predates most of the franchises trying to take it away." And as if to vindicate Ford's stand, on their Thanksgiving outing last Thursday the Lions terrorized the Chicago Bears, 55-20.

Ford hasn't spared his own organization either. He has shaped a radical restructuring of the team and in the process made it a key component in revitalizing Detroit, one of America's most distressed major cities. He first fired head coach Wayne Fontes and installed former San Diego Chargers coach Bobby Ross. He also revamped the Lions' archaic ticketing policy, bolstered the team's marketing campaign, launched a Website and started weekly radio and TV shows that air during the season. "We really needed a face-lift," he says. "We're in the entertainment business. It's all marketing and customer satisfaction."

His biggest push, though, has been to try to bring the Lions closer to the heart of Detroiters through development efforts with Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and Mike Ilitch, chairman of Little Caesars Enterprises and owner of Detroit's Red Wings hockey and Tigers baseball franchises. For the past 20 years, the Lions have played home games before declining crowds in a domed stadium in suburban Pontiac, Mich. But within Archer's fledgling movement to rebuild Detroit, Bill Jr. sensed both a civic opportunity and the prospect of a sweeter stadium deal than the current one, which is among the worst in the league. While franchises like the Dallas Cowboys rake in as much as $40 million a year from stadium suites, parking and concessions, the Lions' lease offers no stadium revenue. Instead, proceeds are pumped into operating the Silverdome and paying down debt. "We never should have left the city in the first place," Ford says.

Against some initial skittishness from his father, the man who had moved the team to Pontiac, Bill Jr. persisted in negotiations and struck a deal to build a $265 million, 70,000-seat domed stadium next to a new open-air ball park being built for the Tigers. The Ford family and corporate sponsors will pick up nearly half the stadium cost, while various government agencies will pay the other half for ownership. The NFL has promised to hold a Superbowl there.

Back at Ford, Bill Jr. has already shown some moxie in being a champion of environmental issues. He chairs a new board committee that is reviewing the company's approach to such vital matters as fuel economy and greenhouse gases. Ironically, Ford lags behind rivals like GM in areas such as electric-powered cars. Bill Jr. views his appointment as progress for a company in which "even office recycling was met with resistance." Says Ford: "I can remember when the board asked me to stop associating with the environmentalists. I said, 'Absolutely no.'" Recently he took the podium at a Society of Automotive Engineers' conference and made an impassioned appeal to his audience to work harder and faster on building cleaner cars.

Bill Jr. is becoming quite agile at balancing football and cars, and he's even found time to indulge his passion for fly fishing now and then. But the luxury of such leisure will soon be coming to an end. The company has clearly prospered of late, significantly narrowing the once enormous lead of archrival General Motors Corp. Still, the Ford that Ford takes over will present plenty of challenges.

Trotman's Ford 2000 re-engineering initiative has gone a long way in boosting the company's manufacturing efficiency. Bill Jr., though, will inherit perhaps an even tougher job of maintaining aggressive cost-cutting initiatives while revving up the automaker's moribund overseas operations. The company is performing poorly in Europe, struggling to overcome a costly restructuring in Brazil and Argentina and stumbling in its efforts to snare 10% of the Asian market by 2005.

Ford's profits come mostly from the mature markets of North America, Europe and Canada, but forecasts of double-digit growth in Asia-Pacific markets make success critical there. With 9 out of 10 cars sold in Asia bearing Japanese nameplates, Ford's drive is all uphill.

Bill Jr. will probably face a far more hostile environment than his predecessor ever did. Still, he seems resigned that there's no way to avoid such a fate, given his famous brand name, and he says he'll be happy to take the risk of leadership. "No matter how things turn out, I'm a Ford," he says. "So I'm not going anywhere else."

--With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit