The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, writes a blog, Starkman Approved. This column first appeared in his blog.
By Eric Starkman
CEO Jim Farley
I’ve spent plenty of time bashing Ford CEO Jim Farley. Recent features in the Detroit Free Press forced a reassessment. A chief executive who for decades has quietly volunteered at a Detroit homeless shelter reflects a humility that is anything but standard issue in corporate America. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted, humility is an underrated leadership trait, namely the belief that no task is beneath you.
Detroit Free Press reporter Jamie L. LaReau published multiple stories (see here and here) detailing Farley’s volunteer and fundraising efforts for Detroit’s Pope Francis Center, which provides lifesaving support for more than 200 guests daily, including nutritious meals, access to showers, laundry service, and free clinics offering a range of professional services. The center’s 60,000-square-foot Bridge Housing campus offers residents up to three months of shelter, along with medical, psychological, addiction, social, and job-readiness services designed to help them transition into permanent housing.
Farley has a close friendship with the Rev. Tim McCabe, CEO of the Pope Francis Center, and has allowed McCabe to leverage that relationship to help raise $40 million to build the Bridge Housing campus, which opened in September 2024.
Alcoholism and other drug addictions are among the leading causes of homelessness, and the disease is a deeply personal one for Farley. His first cousin, Chris Farley, was a beloved Saturday Night Live cast member renowned for his physical comedy who went on to star in films such as Airheads, Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Almost Heroes, in which he co-starred with the late Matthew Perry.
From his early acting days through the height of his fame, Chris Farley struggled with obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse. He died of a drug overdose in 1997 at the age of 33.
As a major donor to the Pope Francis Center, Farley could have insisted on formal recognition bearing his own name. Instead, the room where Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings are held, along with classes in job skills, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and financial literacy, is named after his cousin.
“Chris would be so happy,” Farley said of the room. “The way he dealt with pain was laughter, so if he was here, he wouldn’t be serious. When he had problems, that was how he dealt with it, and I think that’s part of the reason why it didn’t work. You need real hard tools” to overcome addiction, Farley told LaReau.
Farley, a self-described “hard-nosed dude,” rarely speaks openly about his cousin.
“He’s like a fifth drawer that I rarely open,” Farley told the Detroit News earlier this year when he agreed to talk about Chris on the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live.
Farley said he would seek Chris out during family reunions when the Farley clan gathered in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Chris always got in trouble, but it was innocent,” Farley recalled, noting that Chris had a habit of crashing family cars and blaming deer for jumping out in front of him, even when that clearly wasn’t the case.
“It was very childlike, this ‘live in the moment, let’s have fun’ kind of energy,” Farley said. “He was always very physical. He loved taking over the bar, taking over the family function, taking over the airport if he could.
“He was always performing. Always.”
I’m typically skeptical when I read about the good deeds of companies or CEOs in the media. Many executives profess support for charitable causes and serve on prestigious nonprofit boards that conveniently burnish their “giving back” credentials. Writing a check that earns naming rights is not the same thing as showing up.
What distinguishes Farley’s involvement is that his volunteer work at a homeless shelter predates his tenure as Ford’s CEO by decades. He didn’t assume that role until October 2020. LaReau reported that Farley agreed to speak publicly about his volunteer work specifically to help advance the Pope Francis Center’s fundraising efforts.
It’s difficult to imagine a public relations professional crafting a statement more candid than the one Farley offered LaReau.
“My family is a big Catholic family and like many Catholic families we have plenty of examples of struggling with addiction,” Farley said. “So we thought having a room would be great because it’s a big problem that we have to unpack for people here. It’s a big problem in a lot of families like our family, and it’s a tragic thing.”
Farley has said he views Ford’s success as “not just how much money we make for the shareholders. It’s (about) are we going to be here helping Michigan? I’ve seen so many executives and leaders of these companies that don’t even live here.”
He also said that roughly one-third of Ford’s 60,000 global employees are engaged in regular volunteer work.
Ford’s professed commitment to Michigan isn’t mere rhetoric. As I recently reported in Deadline Detroit, Ford has emerged as Detroit’s undeniable hometown automaker. In addition to committing more than $1 billion to build a modern and expansive headquarters in its native Dearborn, Ford spent well over $500 million to help renovate the long-abandoned Michigan Central Station and relocated hundreds of employees into the city.
None of this is an absolution. CEOs are ultimately judged on results, not virtue, and Ford has endured more than its share of missteps under Farley’s leadership, including roughly 150 safety recalls this year and an aggressive early electric-vehicle strategy that proved misguided. Still, there are signs of operational improvement.
Consumer Reports says Ford has made genuine gains drivers will notice. The automaker recently achieved its highest reliability ranking in fifteen years.
“There’s a lot of good there,” Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ director of testing, told the Detroit News. “If you haven’t driven a Ford or Lincoln recently, the driving dynamics, the interior comfort, some of the innovation they’re doing is really, really impressive.”
Another example of Farley’s restraint as a leader surfaced recently in The New York Times. The publication reported on Ford’s secretive electric-vehicle skunkworks in Long Beach, California, overseen by Doug Field, a veteran executive who previously worked at Tesla and Apple and began his career at Ford decades ago.
To protect the project from corporate interference, the Times reported, “anyone not on Mr. Field’s select team wasn’t even allowed through the door. No exceptions.”
Apparently, that rule includes the CEO. In an interview with NBC News last year, Farley mentioned in passing that his access card does not grant him entry to the skunkworks lab. He was also notably absent from the facility’s official opening.
Humility will not fix recalls or flawed strategies. But leaders who show up when no one is watching, and step back when they are not needed, are increasingly rare. That is worth noticing.
