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Ford Motor Company announced today that Lewis Booth, 63, executive vice president and chief financial officer, and Derrick Kuzak, 60, group vice president, Global Product Development, will retire on 1 April. Both of these key executives served the Number Two U.S. automaker for more than 30 years. Booth had wanted to retire for years but stayed on out of loyalty. Kuzak came as a surprise.

These senior executive changes are unfortunate in timing as both the highly compensated Booth and Kuzak did yeoman’s work in trying to right a still troubled company that recently is showing signs of returning to competitive health.

In late 2008, a week after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a worldwide financial crisis and the ongoing Great Recession, Booth returned from heading Ford of Europe to Dearborn as Ford’s chief financial officer where management was struggling with the dire cumulative effects of years of losses, declining sales, heavy debt loads and unfunded pension liabilities – the same issues Booth was grappling with in Europe. Prior to that Booth headed Mazda in Hiroshima. Ironically, it was Booth as Ford’s CFO who was forced to sell Ford’s controlling interest in the feisty Japanese company for badly needed cash. Continue reading →