He stands at the front of the room, a man not quite the master of his audience, but confident of his powers.

After all, he's the chairman of a global company with 18,000 employees, 10 million customers in 40 countries and a profit last year of almost $1.3 billion. When he speaks, people pay attention.

That is, grown-ups usually do.

But this is a tough audience -- about 140 fidgety kids, grade school through high school -- at Birmingham's Eton Academy.

These are professional-level fidgets and skeptics. All have learning disabilities; that's what Eton's all about. All of them have faced ridicule. And despite the hope and success the Eton experience gives them, all the kids deal with frustration and anger daily.

So Don Winkler, chairman of Ford Motor Credit Co., has his work cut out for him if he wants these kids to listen.

But he's one of them. He understands.

This chief executive of the world's largest automotive finance company is plagued by learning disabilities that make it a battle for him to read, write, pronounce words correctly and dial a phone number. There are at least 127 words that he simply can't read.

He was always put in the slow reading group in grade school in New Jersey. He was accused of irreverence when he would loudly sing "pairse the Lord" in church.

The dyslexia -- an impaired ability to read -- and other problems haven't gone away. Winkler simply learned to work around them.

That's his message to the Eton kids and his own two children who are dyslexic: You probably won't outgrow learning disabilities, but you can do well in spite of them. And finding ways to cope can juice up your creativity.

"Everybody who works for me can read better than I can, speak better than I can, do math better than I can ...but I work harder than they do," Winkler says. For example, he goes to bed at 9 p.m. and gets up at 3 a.m. to ready himself for the office by doing mental concentration exercises.

Winkler supplements hard work with a high IQ, simple tricks and an array of gadgets.

Eye contact helps him stay focused on a conversation, so he looks in a compact mirror while he talks on the phone. He uses a Palm Pilot to keep a very detailed daily plan and sound an alarm when it's time to prepare for a meeting. He makes notes to himself on a tape recorder.

An electronic scanner speaks written words on a page. To reverse the process for his many speeches and briefing papers, another device types what he dictates. An aide programs Winkler's cell phone with frequently dialed numbers, because a 6 too often looks like a 9 ...

Even with all the aids "There are things you'll find you can't handle. That makes me mad; and it'll make you mad," Winkler confesses.

When that happens, he says, he has another trick to keep from taking himself too seriously: He puts on a red foam-rubber clown nose.

Winkler tosses clown noses into the audience from a big plastic bag. The younger kids squeal and scramble after the spongy red globes; the junior- and senior-high students hang back at first, staying cool for a few minutes before they, too, join the nose grab.

Now Winkler has his audience. Pretentions are useless behind a clown nose; everyone looks equally silly. Now the question-and-answer session can get the kids personally plugged in to Winkler's energy.

It's a patented Winkler procedure, stripping away fear and pretense and getting down to basics -- a skill he uses in the office as well as the classroom. More than once he has made a room full of contentious Ford Credit executives wear clown noses while they worked through a thorny issue.

It's part of what he calls his Breakthrough Leadership Process, questioning the status quo, encouraging new thinking. "There was a problem of barriers within Ford Credit and between Ford Credit and Ford Motor," he says.

Facing challenges

Perhaps because Winkler was a little bit different from others since babyhood, he has never shied away from the unconventional. The 52-year-old has made his career in numbers -- a field most dyslexics would avoid like botulism.

For four years after he earned a bachelor's degree from California's Northrop University in 1972, he worked as an electronics design engineer and production manager and began forging a reputation as a guy who changes processes.

Winkler went to Citibank in New York in 1976 as a vice president and put management in touch with customers and raised profits in a series of assignments that ended with his appointment as a global divisional executive.

Banc One Corp. in Ohio recruited Winkler in 1993. There, he became chairman of the Finance One subsidiary. Under his direction for six years, Finance One became the nation's second-largest bank-owned automotive lender; it went from $300 million to $41 billion in assets, with annual profit growth of more than 30 percent.

Ford Motor Co. named Winkler chairman of its Ford Credit subsidiary in October.

With a core group of about a dozen aides, including outside consultants, and the prep time he requires for meetings and presentations, Winkler admits he's a high-maintenance executive. Planning a major speech can involve 15 or 20 people, including audio-visual technicians.

So far, it appears he is worth the effort for Ford Credit. In his seven months with the company, quarterly profits have risen smartly.

Earnings the fourth quarter of 1999 (his first three months with the company) were up 32 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. Earnings for the first quarter of this year were up 18 percent, despite some costs for restructuring Ford Credit operations.

Building bridges

Winkler has succeeded not by knowing a 6 from a 9, but by knowing how to break down barriers of tradition and turf protection, say people inside the company.

One example: Ford Motor wanted to keep consumer costs low on leased cars; Ford Credit wanted costs higher, to hedge against lease-end losses when vehicles are sold on the used-car market. Winkler got his executives to flex and invest their energy in the larger notion of increasing sales volume and overall revenue.

"We simply needed to agree that we all work for Jac Nasser and that our job at Ford is to sell more cars," Winkler said.

This March, with incentives for customers and dealers, Ford Credit financed 369,961 new and used car and truck contracts in the United States and Canada -- the largest volume in Ford Credit history and a 15-percent increase over March 1999.

Winkler has a good reputation in the finance industry. "He's a builder of businesses. At Banc One, he took a number of disparate businesses and knit them into Finance One," says Joseph Duwan, a banking analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods Inc. "He's a hands-on manager and a good motivator, and I think he developed a pretty effective management team under him at Finance One."