Biography | Jim Farley — The Anderson MBA That Sent Him Into Lexus

People treat the Ford chair as a Dearborn apprenticeship that began at eighteen.

The degree that opened the first automaker door was taken on the Westwood side of the UCLA campus.

Farley finished the MBA at the Anderson School of Management in 1990.

The school still sits at 110 Westwood Plaza, in the cluster that includes Cornell Hall, Gold Hall and the later Marion Anderson Hall.

Ford's own archived executive biography states that he joined Toyota in 1990 in the strategic-planning department after the Anderson year.

Lexus itself had only just gone on sale in the United States, in September 1989.

He was hired into that young luxury channel, not into a Dearborn training class.

Bloomberg later recorded a short IBM sales stint between Georgetown and the MBA.

The pin is the Anderson complex, a public professional school, not a private house in Westwood.

A visitor reaches it from Sunset Boulevard and Westwood Plaza; the coordinates are the published campus point for the school, not a guess at a seminar room.

From Anderson he spent nearly two decades inside Toyota and Lexus.

Roles included field work with dealers, product planning in the United States and Europe, the launch of the Scion youth brand, Toyota Division marketing, and finally group vice president and general manager of Lexus.

That last Lexus job is what Alan Mulally bought in 2007.

The MBA year is the hinge between a Georgetown economist and a man who would market first Toyota and then Ford.

Without this Westwood paper the later Dearborn titles do not start.

Photo: UCLA Anderson campus photographs circulate on Wikimedia Commons under named free licences; confirm the file page before reuse.