That man was Alan Mulally, executive vice president of Boeing and president and C.E.O. of its commercial airplane business. But after more than a month of talks, Mulally had just called to turn down the job.

Ford spent much of the weekend slumped in a chair in his house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a blank pad of paper and nothing whatsoever to write on it. He was out of ideas. He was, he says, “silent and devastated. I had no plan B.”

There were many scenarios, of course, but none of them palatable: a fire sale of assets or even an outright auction to the highest bidder. Or a wide-open C.E.O. search that would vet all the usual high-profile suspects—the Jack Welch protégés like Bob Nardelli at Home Depot or Jim McNerney at Boeing—and could easily result in a leader who would impress Wall Street and get Ford directors out of the hot seat but might ultimately destroy the fabric of the company.

From the outset in 1903, Ford’s business model involved more than just turning a profit. Henry Ford’s brilliance was not only the development of the assembly line but also a policy of shared interests. By instituting a then unheard-of $5-a-day wage, he created a stable workforce as well as a mass market for the company’s Model T. While other corporate executives measured decisions by their effect on the stock price, Ford stuck to a broader mandate, contributing to the community and trying to be fair to workers.

Through the years, the Ford family has upheld that philosophy by staying both interested and in control, with 3.75 percent of the equity plus a special class B stock that gives them 40 percent of the shareholder vote and the power to block takeovers. “Most companies have ever-changing executives—nameless, faceless business suits,” Ford says. “The family gives this company a sense of accountability. It gives the company a conscience.”

Nonetheless, Bill Ford was truly a reluctant C.E.O. He’d been a smart, frenetic, curious kid—a contrarian thinker—and probably a lot better suited to Silicon Valley than the Motor City. Born William Clay Ford Jr., he’d struggled with the destiny he couldn’t escape. His uncle Henry Ford II, of the third generation, had run the company from 1945 until 1979. Nobody ever said it, but Bill knew that he, as the fair-haired boy of the fourth generation, was the logical one to step up.

When he graduated from Princeton in 1979, he was tempted to follow his friends to Wall Street, but he had a sense of Ford’s larger place in the world. An environmentalist, he dreamed that the company could become a pioneer in developing cleaner cars and manufacturing. He also felt strongly (others thought naively) that the company should do more to enlist labor, not fight it. So Bill Ford trudged back to Dearborn to what he knew would be a long, grueling march through a series of corporate jobs—18 in all, including product planning analyst, head of climate control, heavy-truck engineering manager, head of Switzerland—fighting against nonfamily managers who didn’t want to see a Ford in the executive suite. He developed insomnia. He didn’t know if his career was headed anywhere, let alone toward the top. Plenty of times he almost quit.

In January 1999, though, Ford was named chair, and Jacques Nasser, head of the company’s automotive operations and one of the industry’s brightest stars, became C.E.O. Nasser was clearly the bigfoot—a darling of Wall Street and the guy who gave credence to the deal. (Ford’s stock reached a high of $68 a share by May.) While Nasser set out to transform Ford from a car manufacturer into a consumer-driven provider of automotive goods and services, Bill Ford wanted to make the place a corporate model for the 21st century.

Finally, he could push Ford to explore hybrid technology, keep it focused on the future, and try to enfranchise workers who, he believed, could be a critical asset. “There are people who think I’m a Bolshevik,” Ford said at the time, “but I really don’t care.” Many auto executives thought he was nuts. Wall Street questioned if he was up to the job. With Nasser at the wheel, though, Bill Ford could afford to be outrageous. Looking back, it’s striking how similar much of his thinking was to Toyota’s.