“But because the social media team is moving at such a high rate of speed, we have to know how to react almost at the gut level. That’s why this job is part art and it’s part science. You just have to have a sense for some of this stuff.”
Monty, who grew up in Connecticut, holds medical science and MBA degrees from Boston University. He had worked in Boston his entire career before coming to Ford, first as a deal maker between small, promising technology startups and big pharmaceutical companies.
“After Sept. 11, that kind of dried up, so I moved into advertising and marketing in the high-tech and life science space,” said Monty, the married father of two boys, ages 8 and 5. “That’s where I finally got the bug for more things digital and eventually social media. I didn’t know then that it was going to be as significant as it is now, although I
He was part of a social media consultancy in Boston when Ford called about taking the position he holds now.
Accustomed to working virtually (he and his partners, one who lived in Connecticut and the other from New Jersey, connected daily via Skype video calls), “my first question to the team at Ford here was do I have to relocate to Detroit? They said, yeah, you do, it’s kind of a leadership role and we need your presence here. I really wasn’t too gung-ho about it at that point. But they convinced me to come out here. And this was one of those instances when I met the team and was just blown away by their passion and their talent and their level of commitment to Ford. When I took the time to investigate where Ford was going — because I wasn’t an American car guy; I wasn’t a car guy to begin with, but I hadn’t been an American car guy — I looked at the leadership team and I looked at the business plan and I looked at the product cadence. I thought there’s something going on here that is different. I looked at the marketing leadership. (Ford marketing chief) Jim Farley had come over from Toyota. That itself was a sign. I said there’s something special going on here. Being where I thought the social media industry was in its evolution, I thought it was a very unique opportunity.”