Auto exec breaks mold

NOVI, Mich. — In the buttoned-up world of automotive chieftains, Tower Automotive Inc. CEO Kathleen Ligocki is something of an oddity, even beyond gender.

Ligocki had no intention of making a career in the automotive business when, 25 years ago, she took a job as a factory foreman at a General Motors Corp. plant in Kokomo, Ind.

At the time, a year after she received a bachelor’s degree in Chinese history and Renaissance art at Indiana University, Ligocki planned to work only until she had sufficient cash to further her studies in graduate school.

“Here was their pitch: We’re having a lot of attrition issues so we’d like to hire someone who is otherwise unemployable, like a female liberal arts graduate,” Ligocki said. “I was like, ‘OK, great. How much are you going to pay me?’ “

Ligocki grew to love the pace and culture of the factory, and, having put aside her grad school plans, moved a few years later to a GM sales job in Boston. For the past two decades, she has spent much of her career ascending the ranks at GM and then at Ford Motor Co., making a name for herself in the largely male executive offices.

She was serving in an executive post last August when she moved to Tower — a step that surprised many observers.

Mentioned only a month earlier by chairman Bill Ford as someone who one day could lead the automaker, Ligocki, now 47, left her job as Ford’s vice president of customer service to become president and chief executive of Tower, a growing but debt-laden auto supplier that ranked 40th among competitors in global sales last year.

The 11-year-old Tower produces components and assemblies for every major automaker. Its primary product is metal body structures for vehicles — the part of the car or truck beneath the “skin” — but it also makes powertrain modules, suspension components and other parts.

It had $2.8 billion in sales last year but is saddled with more than $1 billion in long-term debt and, like other suppliers, faces intense pressure from automakers to cut costs and prices.

In a recent interview, the high-energy, personable Ligocki said the decision to leave Ford was difficult, one she discussed at length with Bill Ford. But it was a move that elevated Ligocki, who once ran Ford of Mexico, to what many consider the highest perch of any woman in the automotive industry.

“They encouraged me to stay, but they also understood — maybe Bill better than anybody — that this was an opportunity to run a publicly traded company, and that doesn’t come around too often,” Ligocki said. “Tower, in particular, was a company I thought had great strategic strengths — market position, revenue growth, technical capability. But it needed operational work, which was a lot of what I had done at GM and Ford. So I felt I could offer something to the company.”

Ligocki wasted little time shaking things up.

Tower, which has more than 12,000 employees in 14 countries, announced in October it was consolidating some North American divisions and relocating its headquarters from Grand Rapids, on the western side of Michigan, to the Detroit suburb of Novi, closer to key customers such as GM, DaimlerChrysler and Ford, Tower’s biggest client.

A key part of Ligocki’s plan for the company is to diversify the customer mix. As such, over the next couple of years, Ford’s share of Tower’s sales is forecast to decline from 33 percent last year to 28 percent, while GM grows from 10 percent to 15 percent, Nissan/Renault from 2 percent to 8 percent and Toyota from 4 percent to 5 percent.

In addition, North America’s share of Tower’s revenue will shrink from 71 percent to 58 percent as Tower increases its business in Europe, Asia and South America. Tower, whose top competitors include Magna International Inc., Thyssen-Budd and Dana Corp., already has two joint ventures in the quickly emerging Chinese market.