DEARBORN, Mich. -- As simple as this sentence is, the new CEO of Ford Motor Credit couldn't read it out loud without stumbling like a 6-year-old.

Don Winkler, CEO of Ford Motor Credit, rises at 3 a.m. to get a head start with mental warm-up exercises. His dyslexia is so severe, he cannot read a list of names at a graduation ceremony.

Winkler stares at the letters "C" and "F" to hone his powers of concentration. The exercise is part of 20 minutes of mental "warm-up" he does daily. Strong eye contact and visual diagrams help keep him on track during meetings.

Winkler, 52, has what the experts call "deep" dyslexia, more severe than the mild or surface varieties. More than 60% of prison inmates have learning disabilities. "Dyslexia is a disease," Winkler says, and he figures most adults afflicted this badly are behind bars or living with their parents, dysfunctional products of being dismissed as slow or retarded since first-grade reading class.

Winkler, driven to success by the daggers of his childhood and the desire to prove to dyslexic children that they can succeed, heads a 19,000-employee company that makes more auto loans than GMAC or any other.

The price he pays is a 3 a.m. alarm each morning, a head start on a world that thinks so differently. Winkler's day begins with 20 minutes of mental "warm-ups" that could be mistaken for first-grade homework.

He tunes his focus by staring at squares on his computer screen, zooming in and out, changing the background back and forth from white to black. He stares at the letters "C" and "F," clicking his mouse to flip them sideways and upside down. He excelled in calculus in school, but one of the math problems he does at 4 a.m. is 4 + 1 = 5. He studies a long list of "trigger" words, such as "get" or "it" that he stumbles on because he can't visualize them like he can more difficult words such as elephant.

Winkler has a reputation for making great speeches, but he can't make a simple one without exhaustive practice. E-mails arrive written entirely in uppercase because he reads block letters more easily. Without speed dial he would constantly be calling the wrong number. Contractions are roadblocks to his mind, so "can't" will be the last one that appears in this story.

Tears well in Winkler's eyes aboard a corporate jet as he recalls being 7 and unable to spell the word "red" in front of big brother Dickie's friends. He says he still hears snickering in the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church in Phillipsburg, N.J., when he sang "praise dog from whom all blessings flow" instead of "praise God."

The memories, 45 years old, will keep him awake tonight, he says.

About 25 million Americans have dyslexia. Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill were among the D-students whose minds would stumble on the letters "b" and "d," and silent vowels.

Many dyslexics, including Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg, gravitate to the arts. But a new era of intellectual property in business is unearthing creativity from the dyslexic minds of CEOs Craig McCaw, Charles Schwab and Cisco Systems' John Chambers.

Though they have never met, Chambers shares a bond with Winkler. "I tried to read in third grade and everybody laughed," Chambers says. Like Winkler, he wants "to let people know they are in charge of their own destiny."

Strategies for focusing

It is 4 a.m. when Winkler arrives at his Dearborn, Mich., office. There is a video camera mounted in front of his desk, the kind other executives use for teleconferencing. For Winkler it is a tool to keep his mind from racing in a thousand directions. When talking on the phone he projects a live video of himself on a big-screen TV and looks himself squarely in the eye.

Eye contact is crucial to focus, he explains, even when face to face. Later on he demands "a little eye contact here" at a breakfast meeting over a mushroom omelet with Ford Credit North America President Greg Smith when Smith loiters over his notes.

An innocent consequence of lost focus is the monologues Winkler habitually launches into, think-alouds that are laden with insight about everything except the subject at hand. "Quite a walk down the garden path," says communications Vice President Walter Jennings, who says it is acceptable to interrupt the boss and steer him back on course.

A less innocent consequence is what Winkler calls his debilitating slides into "the world of insecurity, or worse, the world of anxiety."

When he is at the top of his game, Winkler is the ultimate CEO-coach who wins healthy productivity from the troops, says Ken Clark, Winkler's chief of staff. Beth Acton, Ford Credit's chief financial officer, says she has received more useful advice from Winkler in the eight months he has been on the job than she has had in 17 years at Ford.

But when Winkler slides, and everyone around him has seen it, he loses confidence and "rants and yells" in anger like the definitive insecure boss, Clark says.

"If you do not keep the discipline, you tend to go off into other worlds," Winkler says.

The best way to handle Winkler, Clark says, is to let him blow off steam. "Then I ask for some coaching" on what seems to have angered him because, above all, Winkler sees himself as a teacher, Clark says.

Winkler requires a lot of attention from his troops. At a recent board meeting, Acton says she was concentrating on her part of a presentation and failed Winkler by not providing enough eye contact and nods of support as he spoke.

"He became very nervous and talked way too fast to be clear," Acton says. "He needed feedback from me."

Ford Credit officers say Winkler often does not "get it" until they go reluctantly to an easel to draw pictures so that, for example, Winkler can visualize what Ford customers experience when their leases expire. MBA-types are usually linear thinkers and have not so much as doodled since grade school. But they say a few crude stick figures can switch light bulbs on in Winkler's brain, and he then takes their ideas to depths and angles never considered, a process he calls "upgrading."

"Don's brain has created a compensatory pathway," says Sam Marks, an organizational psychologist and longtime friend. "He has changed his brain."

Help from technology

A drive from Winkler's office to his 4,000-square-foot condominium is short. "2.7 minutes," he says, long enough for a quick story about how he met his second wife, Deborah. "I dated her 18 times over 18 weeks before we kissed for the first time."

"I had to ask," Deborah says.

"I had never dated before," Winkler says. He fell in love with his first wife, Carol, at 13. "She was my best friend, my high school sweetheart," but the marriage collapsed under the weight of Winkler's high maintenance. Carol was a straight-A student who gave up college and career ambitions to put Winkler through Northrop University, raise two children and be his one-woman support system. She proofread every report and letter he wrote on his way up.

Winkler says he remains close friends with his first wife and is determined not to lean on Deborah the same way. Technology is his nanny and he owns the latest in gadgetry, from the most expensive PalmPilot to a Quicktionary reading pen that scans written words, defines them in writing and speaks the pronunciation into an earpiece. His house is littered with recording devices into which he dictates ideas.

"He will give you 100 ideas. Your job is to pick out the best three or go crazy trying to do all 100," says Barrett Burns, Ford Credit's executive vice president of global risk management, who worked with Winkler at Banc One Credit and Citibank.

Winkler joined Ford Credit in October, recruited by Ford CEO Jacques Nasser. Winkler replaced Phillipe Paillart, who was forced out after 13 months. Paillart became caught up in the transitional crossfire when Nasser replaced former CEO Alex Trotman, Winkler says.

"Don is enormously creative and has that rare ability to mobilize people to come up with new ideas that generate results," Nasser says. "In just eight months, Don has engineered new initiatives that have increased our customer satisfaction as well as our revenues."

Organizing daily life

Aboard a hotel treadmill at 5 a.m., Winkler says his pre-dawn regimen fills him with confidence, and "as the day goes on, I get more stable, more powerful." Waking at 3 a.m. means he must get to sleep by 9 p.m., and he makes an art of disappearing at dinner functions.

Winkler charts everything. He inputs into a computer program today's breakfast: skim milk, coffee, raisins, a half cup each of Cheerios and Special K. He inputs his body temperature, cholesterol level, hours of TV. Today he judges his mood, self-esteem, anxiety level, even his sex drive to be all above average.

"They call it anal-retentive," Winkler says, but it allows him to see his life visually and plot graphs to see if, say, what he eats might be influencing his focus.

His daily calendar is mapped out three weeks in advance by Clark, and the first block of time - 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. - is always set aside for thinking about a single business challenge. Never two things. "It is always one," Clark says.

One day recently between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. he thought about his first face-to-face meeting in eight days with Chambers, the dyslexic CEO of Cisco Systems. Winkler will plan 3 a.m. thinking sessions as much as a year in advance when he considers it important, and he hopes to get Chambers and Schwab together in January for a dyslexic "summit to help kids."

Winkler is a casual dresser, and acquaintances tell him he looks like actor Jackie Gleason. He blames the resemblance on his weight. It has ballooned from 185 pounds to 250 since he got married and gave up running five years ago.

Winkler's two grown children are both dyslexics. Winkler himself never knew he had dyslexia, had never even heard the word, until he was a 19-year-old electrical engineering student studying twice as hard as his classmates to keep from flunking out. Today he has his own Web site, www.cyberwink.com, largely dedicated to helping dyslexic children.

His boyhood friends remember him for his perseverance and creativity, sometimes suggesting trick plays to the high school football coach, says Joe Lissi, now a special education teacher.

Winkler had his electrician's license at 16, and Phillipsburg parents started pointing to the slow learner as someone whose future was secure because he would always make a good living. Winkler could fix anything and admits to tapping 200 phones about town. His favorite eavesdropping target was the quarterback and his girlfriends, Lissi says.

He grew up with four brothers, all at least 10 years older, in an apartment above the family-run Dick's Store in Phillipsburg.

Winkler says he is unable to read a list of names at a graduation ceremony. Yet, using pictures for notes and reading from a TelePrompTer marked with backslashes for ///emphasis///, underscores to alert him to trigger words and punctuation like "!!!" and "???" at the beginning of sentences, he often emotionally moves audiences.

In his days as a banking executive, he says he transferred more than $300 billion a day on the job, yet has no recollection of his dyslexia ever causing him to make a costly mistake.

Really?

He promises to think about it. The next morning at 5 a.m. he confesses that "those ballistic missiles I launched" had slipped his unconventional mind.