Ford Motor Company on Monday replaced its chief executive, Mark Fields, with former office furniture executive Jim Hackett. The 114-year-old auto giant seeks to become a transformative company capable of taking on Silicon Valley darling Tesla and the coming revolution in smart driving.

Fields retired after 28 years at the company, replaced by former Steelcase CEO Hackett, who has almost zero experience in automobiles until he joined the company last year to head its “smart mobility” transportation initiative.

“We need speed [in] decision making,” Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr., said in a Wall Street Journal interview Monday. Ford, the great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, said he expects the 62-year-old Hackett to be in the job “for a good, long time.”

Ford earned more than $25 billion in profits in the past four years, helped largely by the surging U.S. auto and truck market. But the auto icon is reeling from several challenges, including a srock price that has plummeted more than 30 percent since Fields took over three years ago from Alan Mulally, a former Boeing executive known for his open management style.

“The main issue is the underperformance of the stock price,” said Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at Tigress Financial Partners. “I didn’t think that Mark Fields was a bad CEO. But the net result is that the stock is down in an up market. The stock is down in a period of up auto sales. There is nothing that will limit CEO longevity more than a stock price that is down in an up market.”

The traditional auto companies in general have seen their stock down in recent years because investors believe the boom cycle — driven by historically low interest rates — may be exhausted and that technology threats are looming. Ford may be down more than its counterparts, but some analysts think the change has more to do with the company’s founding family.

“Ford has one, very big shareholder,” said Matthew Stover, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, referring to the Ford family shareholders. “The board and the Ford family thought, ‘We have ideas and we aren’t acting fast enough and we’re not getting enough credit.’ I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.”

Despite its 14.6 percent share of the U.S. car and truck market in 2016, Ford’s market value of $44 billion has been surpassed by electric-car upstart Tesla at $50 billion. The booming U.S. auto market is expected to slow this year.

Hackett’s job will be to reinvent Ford into a new transportation company capable of prospering in a highly competitive and fast-changing business.

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Ford is facing compeititon not only from traditional competitors such as General Motors, Toyota and others. The icon is also battling a new cadre of would-be transportation players who have Detroit on edge.

In addition to Tesla, ride-sharing companies like Uber Technologies, and tech juggernauts such as Alphabet and others are venturing into the transportation domain with smart-car ambitions and revolutionary ideas around fuel.

Palo Alto-based Tesla, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, lost hundreds of millions of dollars last year, has yet to turn a profit and last year produced just 84,000 cars. But its rise has put a scare into the legacy automakers such as Ford and General Motors.

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Ford is betting that Hackett is up to the job. The University of Michigan graduate is a personal friend of Bill Ford, whose family controls the auto giant through its ownership of voting shares. Unlike most auto executives, Hackett does not have a long history in the industry.

When Hackett joined Ford Smart Mobility, he had been on the Ford Motor board of directors for three years.

“Hackett, together with Bill Ford, will focus on three priorities: Sharpening operational execution, modernizing Ford’s present business and transforming the company to meet tomorrow’s challenges,” according to a news release by the company.

Ford is known for making some unusual CEO choices. Bill Ford in 2006 hired Mulally from Boeing. Mulally privatedly borrowed nearly $30 billion to rebuild Ford without government assistance. His overhaul of the automaker included forging new agreements with auto unions that saved costs. Mulally retired after putting the company on a solid footing.

Hackett is known as a customer-minded turnaround artist who thinks outside the box. Like Mulally, Hackett’s style is reported to be more relaxed and direct than the hard-charging Fields, who had climbed the ranks at Ford to the top job.

The company seems conscious enough about those comparisons that in a news conference Monday morning, chairman Bill Ford said “I promised myself I wouldn’t compare [Hackett] to Alan this morning because it’s not right — they’re very different leaders for very different times.” But, he said, “I’ll break this rule just this once,” saying both Mulally and Hackett were the types of leaders able to “capture the hearts and minds of employees” and make them feel that “not only could we win but we were going to win and they were going to have fun on the journey.”

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Ford could also be hoping an outsider will strike gold again, bringing a fresh set of eyes to a car company that could use a jump-start.

“It certainly breaks with a long, in-bred tradition,” says Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has studied CEO succession. Traditionally when it comes to succession, “these guys live in a little cocoon in the greater Detroit area,” making Mulally and Hackett more unusual picks.

As the chief executive of Steelcase, where he served for almost two decades, Hackett transformed the business culture of the office furniture company and advocated a more open-office physical space. He stepped down in 2014.

His nontraditional background includes 16 months at the interim athletic director at the University of Michigan, where he is best known for hiring Jim Harbaugh as its head football coach.

Tichy, who said he has worked with Hackett helping with leadership development and consulting for more than two decades, called Hackett a “transformational leader” who’s good at team-building and is known for having a reputation for integrity, Tichy said.

The former Steelcase CEO voluntarily recalled wall panels of cubicles at the Pentagon that weren’t up to higher fire standards; later reviews said the updated walls kept the fires from spreading on the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tichy said of a story that has also been recounted in management guides.

Chris DeRose, a consultant in Ann Arbor, Mich. who has worked with Tichy and with Steelcase, said of Hackett taking the helm at Ford: “The analogous thing is he would talk about taking Steelcase out of commodity hell. When you think about where the auto industry is, I think there’s a pretty clear message that here’s a guy who knows how to differentiate in a low-margin, commodity based business.”