Ford announced Tuesday that three of its high-ranking executives are retiring as of Jan. 1 as part of a major reshuffling of its top leadership.
The three are J Mays, Ford’s design chief, Jim Tetreault who oversees manufacturing in North America, and labor negotiator Marty Mulloy will retire Jan. 1 as Ford announces a number of new executive appointments.
Mays 59, is a global celebrity in the domain of art and design, important enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker in 1999.
At the time, he was the youngest head designer in Ford’s history, and the first one in decades not to have spent his career working for the company.
A summary of the New Yorker article said:
Given the fact that Ford has just bought Volvo, and owns Jaguar, Mazda, and Aston Martin, as well as the Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln nameplates—and that Mays is responsible for the look of every car the company produces—he may well be the most influential car designer on the planet.
Mays is a pleasant-looking man with a round face and short, sandy-colored hair. He is from Oklahoma, and he has an amiably bland middle American expression, but he spent thirteen years in Europe working for Volkswagen-Audi, and he wears well-cut jackets that distinguish him from the average automobile-industry executive in Detroit.
Mays is a poised speaker. In a speech at a San Francisco art museum, he drew a good crowd to the seven-hundred-seat auditorium, and he entertained them with remarks on design that were weighted toward his admiration for Bauhaus ideas. In Mays’s narrative, such ideas flow naturally into current American theories about marketing...
Mays has a larger role in the marketing of cars than did his predecessor at Ford—a respected designer named Jack Telnack, who created the original Taurus—and he has more to say about such things than did even the most famous and powerful automobile designers of the past: Harley Earl, for example, who designed the extravagant, chrome-bedecked General Motors cars of the nineteen-fifties; Raymond Loewy, who produced several classic Studebakers during the same period; Virgil Exner, the Chrysler designer behind the tail-fin craze; or Bruno Sacco, the longtime head of design at Mercedes-Benz.
