Lee Iacocca

American self-made man who worked his way up to the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. The son of Italian immigrants, he was the living embodiment of the American dream. Monumentally self-confident and impulsively dynamic, Iacocca's career parallels America's love affair with the automobile after WW II. Pugnacious and practical, he did it all on his own.

A Ford employee for 32 years and president for 8 years, he had a bitter parting with the company after months of wrangling and disputes. When he was fired from the Ford Motor Co. on 13 July 1978, he called Henry Ford II a shortsighted, bigoted despot who ran his company on whims and intimidation - then turned his anger into constructive achievement by joining the ailing Chrysler Corp. and turning it around to a successful fast-track. In his autobiography, published in 1984, he wrote "There are times in everyone's life when something constructive is born out of adversity. There are times when things seem so bad that you've got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it." He was convinced that it was the impact of his dismissal by Ford that impelled him to take on the presidency of Chrysler just a few weeks later.

Lee's dad loved automobiles and passed that passion on to his son. "I was the only kid in Allentown who went straight from a tricycle to a Ford. From this point on, I knew I had to be in the car business," he wrote. At 21, even before graduating college, he began at Ford Motor Company as a student engineer. He gradually learned of himself that it was the people-end of the business that called him most strongly and he transferred into sales. A sales campaign in 1956 skyrocketed and after ten years in the company he was suddenly an overnight success.

Promoted to district manager as a reward, he was now in the respectable position to become a family man. He married Mary McLeary, a plant receptionist, and bought a house. Within a year he was head of car marketing.