Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Trevor Worthington, Ford’s Vice-President of Product Development for Asia Pacific, at COMPUTEX Taipei 2014– the world’s second largest computer fair – where we discussed success and innovation in the auto industry.

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Listening and Understanding

To open our chat, Worthington and I spoke about some of Ford Motor Company’s latest technological developments, including SYNC and AppLink, which allow drivers to carry the connection they have on their smartphones into their cars.

Worthington tells me that customers’ needs are the main ignition behind the development of these technologies and highlights the difference between listening and understanding. By really paying attention to what the customers are saying, Worthington tells me that during his 35 plus years at Ford, he’s come to discover that many customers across the world are increasingly alike – they have very similar values, just different ways of expressing them, he says.

One Ford

The company was able to come to this realization, Worthington says, after it adopted a new management philosophy called One Ford driven by its Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally. By simplifying Ford into one global company, Ford has been able to achieve efficiency in scale, Worthington says. He adds that this in turn has been beneficial for customers, the business, fuel economy and safety, the last of which he repeatedly emphasized throughout our conversation, leading me to realize of how important safety – something that I often take for granted – is in the auto industry.

Opening up the Highways

I once learnt in my introductory economics class that Henry Ford is often credited as a pioneer of the assembly line, and vertical integration is often synonymous with the company’s longstanding history.

To conclude, I then ask Worthington what he believes is the secret to Ford’s survival for over a century. Worthington attributes the company’s success to a philosophy of continual improvement, which he says is necessary to make the vision of Ford’s founder a reality. Henry Ford wanted to make driving available to the greatest number of people in the world – to “open up the highways” – a vision similar to one of Bill Gates’ desire to democratize computing that Microsoft’s Roan Kang told me about for the first episode of Innovating Taiwan. And with that, I realize that just like customers worldwide, business leaders are increasingly alike – they have similar visions, just different names for them.

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You can learn more about Innovating Taiwan here and find the podcast series under the Innovating Taiwan category on this blog, on iTunes, ICRT’s website and AmCham’s blog. Episodes are posted on the last Friday of each month.

 

Images via Ford