“Whatever you do, don’t put that guy on before me again,” said the comedian Bob Hope after he had failed to top Lee Iacocca’s rousing speech at a gala night. Hope, an international name and veteran of hundreds of such events, had expected to be following yet another stiff industrial heavyweight that he could use as the butt of his one-liners. However, Iacocca, the son of Italian immigrants, was a master salesman and could sell himself better than any product.
After he left a design engineering apprenticeship and moved on to sales, he rocketed through the traditionally iron-clad hierarchy at Ford Motor Company. Iacocca soon presented such a threat to Henry Ford Jr that, in 1978, he found himself on the street. Ford told him: