Biography | Jim Farley — The First Morning He Took Ford Chair

People treat a Detroit succession as a night-time board leak.

Ford put the change on the calendar in daylight.

On 4 August 2020 the company said Jim Hackett would retire and that Jim Farley, already chief operating officer, would become president and chief executive on 1 October 2020.

The date held.

On Thursday 1 October he became Ford's eleventh chief executive and, the same morning, named John Lawler chief financial officer.

Reuters and Bloomberg both dated the management changes to that first day.

The chair he took still sat in the Glass House at 1 American Road in Dearborn, the 1956 headquarters Ford would keep until the new central-campus building opened in 2025.

This pin is that older tower, not the Snøhetta hall dedicated on 16 November 2025.

A visitor should not expect the 2020 office floor to be a museum room; it is a working corporate site.

Hackett remained an adviser into the following spring.

Farley had been COO only since February or March 2020, after the Explorer launch trouble removed a rival from the succession line.

He had already run Ford Europe from 2015 to 2017 and global markets after that.

The October morning did not invent a car man.

It gave the marketer hired in 2007 the full P&L of a company that was heading for its first annual loss in a decade.

The public factory that frames the same season is the Rouge, where he had posed with the then-new F-150 on 17 September 2020.

The legal change of office happened at headquarters, not on the assembly floor.

Living-person rule: this memory stops at the documented public appointment.

It does not follow him home.

Photo: Jim Farley, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons (Bill Cramer / Ford photographer files as labelled on the file page).