IN 2008, the Ford Motor Company seemed caught in a death spiral.


The company was hemorrhaging cash — more than $83 million a day — as the bottom fell out of the car market. In late autumn, Ford’s stock price bottomed out at $1.01.


Move forward three years. For 2011, Ford turned a net profit of $20 billion on sales of $128 billion. It distributed profit-sharing payments of about $6,200 to each of 41,600 eligible employees. On Friday, its stock closed at $12.48.


It is a remarkable comeback, all the more noteworthy because Ford was the only Big Three carmaker not bailed out by taxpayer money. In “American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company” (Crown Business: $26), Bryce G. Hoffman recounts the turnaround in careful, often gripping detail.


A reporter for The Detroit News who has covered Ford for six years, Mr. Hoffman bases his account on more than 100 interviews and access to a range of company documents and personal notes of participants. (This access, Mr. Hoffman writes, came without Ford exerting any control over what he wrote.) A result is a compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book.


Make no mistake, this is a story, not a structured analysis of Ford’s transformation. Those looking for how-to lists will be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Hoffman offers Mr. Mulally’s vision for saving — and permanently changing — a giant American company. The author explores how Mr. Mulally and his team executed this vision, and what this meant on the dynamic, risky stage of the auto industry.


MR. MULALLY became chief executive in September 2006; William Clay Ford Jr., great-grandson of Henry Ford, recruited him from Boeing. Both men recognized the magnitude of Ford’s problems — and the list was daunting: declining product quality, a gas-guzzling fleet heavily reliant on S.U.V.’s and trucks, huge operating inefficiencies in North America, looming legacy costs from pension and health care obligations to retirees and a public image battered in part by fatal accidents in Ford Explorers with Firestone tires. Ford also had deteriorating employee morale, an ego-driven and backbiting culture among executives, and an awful credit rating that, by early May 2005 had been downgraded to junk-bond status.


Drawing heavily on his experience at Boeing in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Mulally developed an ambitious turnaround plan. He set out to simplify Ford’s product line, its portfolio of brands and its organizational structure. He also aimed to cut operating costs and to improve efficiency — partly by matching vehicle production more closely with what consumers wanted to buy — and to create a few game-changing products.


His overall goal was not only to save Ford, but also to build a profitable, sustainable business.


That is not news in itself. Management literature is replete with tales of improving efficiencies, simplifying businesses and meeting customer priorities. In Mr. Hoffman’s telling, however, at least two aspects of Mr. Mulally’s vision and execution set Ford’s story apart.


First, Mr. Mulally knew that Ford could not hope to improve its market performance without simultaneously changing its culture. Some of the book’s most interesting passages deal with his efforts — often one person at a time — to improve accountability and to foster commitment among executives.


Mr. Mulally’s chief instrument here was data-driven management, in which each executive was responsible for consistently knowing and reporting how his — very few women appear in this story — department was performing. Concentrating on consistent metrics, he argued early on, would focus managerial attention on the big picture while increasing transparency.


He eliminated all corporate-level meetings except for two he introduced: the weekly, mandatory business plan review, when the senior team reported its progress on specific goals, and the special-attention review, when executives took up issues needing in-depth consideration. Over time, both meetings — which occurred daily in crucial periods — would become the highway on which Ford’s leaders drove change.