The chairman of Ford Motor Company, Don Petersen, was about to conclude a brilliant career. Due to retire, he made a final major decision to buy Jaguar Motors for $2.5 Billion. They paid five times book value for a company that sold only 50,000 cars a year. BMW and Mercedes sell 10 times as many. At the time, Jaguar had a serious quality problem. J.D Powers showed their problems per car as 100 times greater than their competition. The Jaguar X-Type was rated by Time Magazine as the sixth-worst-quality car of the decade. Petersen really didn't have to pay J.D. Powers much money to find that out. He could have called me and I would have told him free of charge. My XJS, which is their 12-cylinder model, was an absolute disaster. When it ran, it was one of the finest cars on the road but most of the time it was in the shop. Finally, the engine blew up and they wanted $11,000 to put a new engine in the car! After Ford had bought Jaguar, they sent a team over to inspect the factory. They found out why the quality was so bad. Reports came back that it was probably the worst car plant in the world. That's really saying something when you think of Yugos and Trablants. Time Magazine called the 1975 Trablant "The automobile that gave communism a bad name." Ford spent another $10 billion modernizing the Jaguar plant. According to USA Today, Ford dumped both Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008, selling them to Tata, an Indian company better known for its trucks and cheap passenger cars. Ford had paid $5.3 billion for the two companies. Tata paid only $1.7 billion.

(Sources: Roger Dawson-Secrets of Power Problem Solving, The Career Press, Inc-NJ, 2011)

Pertanyaan : 1. Apakah keputusan CEO tersebut betul atau salah? Jika betul, jelaskan alasannya. Jika salah, jelaskan alasannya.! 2. Jika anda sebagai CEO di perusahaan tersebut, keputusan apa yang akan anda lakukan? 3. Apa resiko-resiko yang mungkin timbul sehubungan dengan keputusan yang diambil? Apa mitigasi resiko-resiko tersebut? 4. Lesson learned apa yang anda dapatkan dari kasus di atas? 5. Saran apa yang bisa anda berikan agar permasalahan tersebut tidak terjadi lagi di kemudian hari?