Mark Stewart and the business of coming full circle

Mark Stewart’s father worked in a tire plant. His grandfather ran a repair shop. Much later, after jobs involving steering systems, Amazon orders and North American car production, Stewart became chief executive of Goodyear. A family connection had turned into an executive assignment. In Akron, the family trade came with a balance sheet.

There is a temptation to make a neat circle of it: boy grows up around cars, boy acquires engineering degree, boy returns to tires. Stewart’s route was considerably less tidy. It took him through different industries and countries, and eventually into a company whose famous name offered no exemption from a difficult market. A recognizable blimp, alas, cannot attend every meeting with the accountants.

A family business, at a different scale

Originally from Madison, Alabama, Stewart spent afternoons in his grandfather’s repair shop. His father worked at Dunlop. Cars were already part of the family’s working life before they became the subject of Stewart’s own career. In his account of joining Goodyear, the opportunity carried an emotional pull because of that connection to tire manufacturing.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering at Vanderbilt and an MBA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The formal education sat alongside that early familiarity with practical work. His later career included plant, production and quality management before the regional and global leadership positions began to accumulate.

His first management jobs were close to production. A plant manager and a chief executive can work for the same business while confronting quite different versions of it. One deals with a particular operation; the other has to decide how operations fit together. Stewart’s résumé stretches between those perspectives. The grandfather’s shop supplies the human beginning, while the years that followed explain the scale of the job he eventually accepted.

The Amazon detour

Before Goodyear, there was Tower Automotive, TRW and ZF TRW Automotive. Stewart’s responsibilities included European operations, steering businesses and Asia Pacific leadership. He lived and worked in the United States, Belgium, Germany and China. His experience was built around the unglamorous necessity of getting complicated physical things made.

Then came Amazon. As vice president of customer fulfillment, he oversaw a North American network spanning 200 operations facilities. His responsibilities brought procurement, construction and engineering together with teams working on automation, artificial intelligence and robotics. The product moving through the building had changed. The need to make the building work had survived the move.

For an automotive executive, fulfillment offers an interesting change of viewpoint. The customer sees an order arriving. Behind that simple event are facilities, equipment and coordinated decisions. Stewart’s role placed him inside that machinery. It would be too convenient to claim every subsequent decision came from Amazon, but the experience belongs in any explanation of the operator Goodyear hired.

From December 2018, he led North American operations at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and subsequently Stellantis. By the time he left, the regional business involved more than 88,000 employees and over $90 billion in revenue. Goodyear appointed him CEO and president effective January 29, 2024, succeeding Richard Kramer.

His work also brought recognition outside the usual production and revenue measures. In 2023, the National Minority Supplier Development Council named him Chief Operating Officer of the Year, an award recognizing leadership in economic equity and minority business integration. Suppliers were part of the story as well as the machinery.

Sentiment meets the balance sheet

The assignment waiting in Akron already had a name. Goodyear Forward was announced in November 2023, before Stewart arrived. Its aims included changing the portfolio, improving margins and reducing debt. He inherited the plan and the responsibility for carrying it through. Giving him credit for inventing it would erase an important part of the chronology.

Its proposed asset disposals included the off-the-road tire business, Dunlop brand rights and chemical operations. That list places a small, sharp complication inside the homecoming story. The brand connected to his father’s working life was also among the assets the company intended to sell. Family history could explain why the job appealed. It could not determine every commercial decision afterward.

The off-the-road transaction closed in February 2025. The Dunlop brand sale followed in May. By the end of October, Goodyear had completed the sale of the majority of its Chemical business. The company reported roughly $2.2 billion in aggregate gross divestiture proceeds, with money intended for debt reduction and transformation initiatives.

Even the word “sale” needs care here. Goodyear retained certain chemical facilities and product rights. The practical business of changing a company involves boundaries, continuing obligations and decisions about what stays. A transformation can sound sweeping in a presentation. On the ground, someone still has to draw the line around each factory and agreement.

The customer who paid for the tires

Stewart’s public appearances offer glimpses of what catches his attention beyond those agreements. At the 2024 SEMA Show, speaking from the Mickey Thompson booth, he noticed modified vehicles wearing the brand’s tires. The owners had purchased them. “They actually bought them,” he said. A purchase was doing something a marketing slide could only describe: revealing a customer’s preference.

After a visit to Mickey Thompson headquarters that year, Stewart also wrote about driving on Baja Boss tires over the weekend. The detail fits the car enthusiast who grew up around a repair shop. It also places him close to the enthusiasts a brand like Mickey Thompson needs to understand. The tires have to earn a place on someone else’s vehicle.

His stated ambition for Goodyear is to lead in tires and service. In 2026, he described a push toward premium products and a simpler dealer relationship through the consolidated Velocity program. That connects the factory to the counter: what gets made, how it is positioned, and how easily a dealer can do business with the supplier.

“At the end of the day, our success is directly tied to our customers’ success.”

Mark Stewart · August 2026

A factory floor, with company

On August 12, 2024, Stewart appeared at Goodyear’s Napanee plant in Ontario alongside Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford. The occasion was an expansion and modernization project valued at C$575 million. Photographs show him walking through the factory with the political guests, past employees and racks of tires. Here, the industrial setting gets to speak for itself.

The announced project targeted electric-vehicle and all-terrain tire production and was expected to create 200 manufacturing jobs. Federal support included up to C$44.3 million. A Canadian government grant record describes new mixing technology and a planned increase of two million tires a year, with the work phase scheduled to finish in December 2028 after an extension.

Those are commitments and planned capabilities, rather than a completed result to hang around a chief executive’s neck. They show the investment side of a tenure often described through asset sales. Goodyear was choosing where to put money as well as where to release it. The distinction becomes real in equipment, production capacity and the people expected to work with both.

The figures that refuse to pose

By the second quarter of 2026, the financial picture remained difficult. Goodyear reported $4.3 billion in sales and a GAAP net loss of $204 million. Tire volume was 36.5 million units, down 4 percent from a year earlier. The company also reported $95 million in quarterly benefits from Goodyear Forward.

These measures answer different questions. Program benefits describe an identified contribution from the transformation. Net income captures a broader result. Their coexistence is the point: executing parts of a plan does not automatically make the whole business profitable. Stewart’s assignment has to be judged with both kinds of evidence still on the page.

In August, he also took part in a long conversation on The Drivecast about the company’s direction, premium tires and competition. The questions themselves reflect the position he occupies. A familiar name can open a conversation. It cannot supply the answer to whether a strategy will work. That answer arrives in orders, costs and subsequent results.

An old house in a new hometown

Away from the corporate program, Stewart found another restoration project. He bought a house in Akron dating to 1926 and began restoring it. His former house in Detroit had been built in the same year. There are more efficient ways to choose somewhere to live, but efficiency is not the only pleasure available to an operations executive.

He has also described visiting Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, the former home of Goodyear co-founder F. A. Seiberling. The attraction was the preserved house, its furniture and the chance to see another time. These are modest personal details, useful because they put an actual person in a city that can otherwise disappear behind a headquarters address.

His connection to the company’s more airborne history is public too. In a LinkedIn post about his first blimp ride, Stewart described how often people ask about the airships and share memories of seeing them. During 2025, his mother visited from Alabama and joined a family ride. She turned 85 that year. A corporate symbol had become a family outing.

The latest chapter extends his reach across the automotive business again. AutoNation appointed Stewart an independent director effective October 13, 2026, announcing the decision three days later. His experience now sits alongside automotive retail governance as he continues to lead Goodyear. The connections run from components and fulfillment to cars, tires and the businesses serving drivers.

It is a career with plenty of movement, and a conspicuous return to where the family story began. Stewart knows the appeal of a repair shop, a working factory and an old house worth keeping. At Goodyear, the next chapter depends on whether the decisions taken in his name produce a business that works better. The family connection got him interested. The work is still underway.