Carolina Pluszczynski
Acting CEO
Michigan Central, Detroit
Employees: 53
Revenue: NA
After working on the transformation of Michigan Central Station from an urban ruin to the gem it has become today, Carolina Pluszczynski, acting CEO of Michigan Central, says she became emotional seeing the looks on people’s faces when they saw the fruits of her team’s work.
“When I first walked into the place, I wondered how we were ever going to do this,” Pluszczynski recalls. “There was so much work to do. The day we opened, I volunteered to work at the place where people saw the grand hall for the first time. Gosh, it was emotional. I saw people’s faces. I got to hear their stories. It was amazing.”
An employee of Ford Motor Co. since 1999, Pluszczynski joined the Michigan Central team in 2019, shortly after Bill Ford purchased the train station. But on her first day in her new role, most of the world was forced to work remotely due to COVID-19.
“I had to build the team while we were all remote,” she says. “In the meantime, the construction people were putting the protocols in place. The world was shut down, but we weren’t. We got a lot done during that period of time.” She adds, “It’s been a great opportunity. I love what I’m doing. I’ve been involved with this project for seven years. It’s ambitious and tangible all at the same time.”
Pluszczynski, the product of Italian immigrants (her mother arrived in metro Detroit via the train station as a child), grew up in Dearborn and attended St. Alphonsus schools for 12 years before going to the University of Michigan–Dearborn to earn a degree in English.
She says her upbringing instilled in her traditional values — hard work, loyalty, determination, resilience, and a sense of responsibility.
“Part of my journey was learning how to both have a career and take care of my family,” she says.
Although Pluszczynski originally thought she wanted to be a lawyer, “I’ve always been a little bit of a tech nerd, and I found there was always a need to fill the gap (in) using technology to advance business — and that’s kind of where I stayed my whole career.”
Her first job out of college was at First Federal of Michigan in Detroit, where she translated business issues into systems and applied that technology at the bank’s branches. “I had a magnificent office with wood bookshelves overlooking the Ambassador Bridge,” she recalls.
She stayed there for a couple of years until the bank was acquired by Charter One Bank of Ohio, which asked her to stay on as a consultant through the merger. She then formed her own company, CAM Consulting, to help the bank with mergers, matching systems between Charter One and their new companies. Eventually, she merged that company with another consulting firm to form CWC Consultants (Continuity With Change).
Ultimately she wanted to be part of a larger team and joined Ford in 1997 as a contractor, integrating new CAD-CAM-CAE software at 82 Ford facilities and hundreds of supplier facilities, all at the same time. She joined Ford as a full-time employee in 1999.
“I spent a lot of time around process improvement, integration, and (figuring out) how to deploy the new software successfully,” she notes.
Her work at Ford has focused on delivering large-scale technology programs to transform the business in manufacturing and product development, along with company-wide programs to accelerate changes in corporate governance, implementing product-driven teams, and progressing diversity and inclusion.
After the software integration, Pluszczynski moved to the Ford Customer Service Division and worked to replace the systems currently in place there.
Four years later, in 2004, she moved into the manufacturing arena, developing and implementing maintenance applications for the systems in the plants.
“I loved manufacturing because it was the heart of what we did,” she says.
From manufacturing, Pluszczynski moved on to global capacity planning, then information technology. Over time, she became chief of staff for the president of Ford Mobility.
“(Ford Mobility) was an innovation group thinking about the things on the fringe of automotive, trying to create an innovation flywheel within the company,” she says.
After three years in that role, the opportunity to become part of the startup incubator (Newlab) and corporate leasing at Michigan Central presented itself.
“It was a culmination of everything I had done,” she says of her decision to join the Corktown project. “To develop an innovation platform that could change the industry — it’s the hardest work I think I’ve ever done, and we’ve come a really long way. The startups are thriving (at neighboring Newlab), and the jobs of the future are being developed at Michigan Central.”
— Tim Keenan
“I wear my mother’s earrings to honor the strength of the women who came before me. My mother came to the United States from Italy with her mother and brother, and that resilience has always lifted me up.”
