Ford makes changes at the top

Ford Motor Co. on Monday replaced its chief executive, Mark Fields, with former office furniture executive Jim Hackett. The 114-year-old auto giant seeks to become a transformative company capable of taking on Silicon Valley darling Tesla and the coming revolution in smart driving.

Fields retired after 28 years at the company, replaced by former Steelcase CEO Hackett, who has almost zero experience in automobiles until he joined the company last year to head its 'smart mobility” transportation initiative.

'We need speed (in) decision making,” Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr., said in a Wall Street Journal interview Monday. Ford, the great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, said he expects the 62-year-old Hackett to be in the job 'for a good, long time.”

Ford earned more than $25 billion in profits in the past four years, helped largely by the surging U.S. auto and truck market. But the auto icon is reeling from several challenges, including a stock price that has plummeted more than 30 percent since Fields took over three years ago from Alan Mulally, a former Boeing executive known for his open management style.

Despite its 14.6 percent share of the U.S. car and truck market in 2016, Ford's market value of $44 billion has been surpassed by electric-car upstart Tesla at $50 billion. The booming U.S. auto market is expected to slow this year.

Hackett's job will be to reinvent Ford into a new transportation company capable of prospering in a highly competitive and fast-changing business.

Ford is facing competition not only from traditional competitors such as General Motors, Toyota and others. The icon also is battling a new cadre of would-be transportation players who have Detroit on edge.

In addition to Tesla, ride-sharing companies like Uber Technologies, and tech juggernauts such as Alphabet and others are venturing into the transportation domain with smart-car ambitions and revolutionary ideas around fuel.