Biography | Jim Farley — The Mid-November Walk Into the Glass House

People treat his Ford years as a single run that begins with the chief-executive title.

The first Ford job was group vice president of marketing and communications, announced in Dearborn on 11 October 2007.

Alan Mulally, then president and chief executive, made the appointment from Toyota's Lexus organisation.

Farley was to join in mid-November 2007 and report directly to Mulally.

The company statement released that day is the primary text: Ford named him its most senior marketing leader and folded global communications under the same chair.

He was forty-five.

The building that housed that announcement was the Henry Ford II World Center, the twelve-storey Glass House at 1 American Road.

That tower, finished in 1956, remained Ford's headquarters through the Mulally years and through Farley's later promotions.

It is not the Snøhetta campus Ford dedicated as World Headquarters on 16 November 2025.

A visitor in 2026 will find the new low building on the central campus; the Glass House still stands nearby as the address the 2007 appointment actually used.

The pin is the Glass House site at 1 American Road, a corporate campus, not a private house.

From this office he later added Canada, Mexico and South America, then Europe, then global markets, then the new-business and technology brief, then the chief-operating-officer title in early 2020.

None of those later titles exist without the mid-November 2007 start.

Mulally had spent 2006 and 2007 restating Ford around the loan-and-product plan known as One Ford.

Hiring the Lexus marketer was part of that restatement.

The walk into the Glass House is the moment the family factory story and the Toyota years occupy the same building.

Photo: Ford World Headquarters (Glass House), Dearborn; use a Wikimedia file whose licence is named on the file page.