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TPG Hires Former Ford CEO Fields to Advise on Industrial Deals

TPG Capital hired Mark Fields, the Ford Motor veteran who was ousted as CEO earlier this year.

TPG Hires Former Ford CEO Fields to Advise on Industrial Deals
Mark Fields. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- TPG Capital hired Mark Fields, the Ford Motor Co. veteran who was ousted as chief executive officer earlier this year, onto its industrials team.

Fields, 56, joined the private equity firm as senior adviser, according to an emailed statement. He spent the last three of his 28 years at Ford as CEO before the board of the second-largest U.S. automaker replaced him with Jim Hackett in May.

At Ford, Fields had replaced Alan Mulally, who saved the company by cutting costs, focusing on its namesake brand and taming a contentious culture. With the help of a fortuitous $23 billion loan in 2006, Mulally helped Ford avoid the U.S.-backed bankruptcies that befell the predecessors of General Motors Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV three years later.

Fields struggled to build investor confidence in his plans to navigate Ford into a new era of electrified, connected and self-driving cars, with the shares falling 37 percent during his tenure in the top job. His successor Hackett, 62, pledged earlier this month to speed up work on green and driverless vehicles, explore more partnerships and acquisitions and cut slow-selling passenger cars from the lineup.

To contact the reporters on this story: Keith Naughton in Southfield, Michigan at knaughton3@bloomberg.net, Melissa Mittelman in New York at mmittelman@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, Anne Riley Moffat