Analysis: The Chrysler CEO was a vainglorious self-promoter, but he also knew how to get people to do great things
Before Elon Musk, before Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca made the business of American business seem like the greatest adventure on the planet. Born Lido Anthony Iacocca in 1924 to immigrant parents who ran an Allentown, Pennsylvania, hot dog restaurant, Iacocca possessed the soul of a salesman, the preening ego of a rock-band frontman and the pluck of a champion poker player.
Along the way, Iacocca became the country’s highest-paid executive, published an autobiography that stayed on thebestseller list for 88 weeks, and was ranked the nation’s third-most admired person in a 1985 Gallup Poll, just behind President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Long before Donald Trump made his cross-over move, Iacocca thought about taking a shot at becoming our first businessman president.
“Whereas the Edsel had been a car in search of a market it never found, here was a market in search of a car,” wrote Iacocca, who was McNamara’s replacement as the head of the Ford division. Alas, the company’s development budget had been plundered by the Edsel, leaving little money to engineer a new model from the ground up. But Iacocca reckoned that Ford could fashion something exciting yet affordable from the dull automotive bones of the Falcon.
Introduced in 1964, Iacocca’s Mustang became the fastest-selling car of its era, selling 1 million units in just two years, exceeding Iacocca’s wildest projections and inspiring a fleet of imitations from Ford’s competition—the Camaro, the Firebird, the Barracuda, the Challenger, the Javelin. Designed to appeal to young people, the Mustang sold in the millions because it made older buyers feel like they were young, too.
Despite his many successes at Ford , Iacocca got the ax from CEO Henry Ford II in 1978. In an interview published after his death, Fordwhy. “He’s too conceited, too self-centered to be able to see the broad picture,” Ford said. At his next stop, as head of the Chrysler Corporation, Iacocca proved Ford half right. More conceited and self-centered than any Fortune 500 business leader in recent history, Iacocca insisted on making himself the face of the beleaguered company.
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