The Global Leadership of Carlos Ghosn at Nissan

3 short brief

THE GLOBAL LEADERSHIP OF CARLOS GHOSN AT NISSAN
Nissan as an organization was suffering from a bad period during the late 1990s, during
which Carlos Ghosn was given the responsibility of the company as the first non-Japanese Chief
Operating Officer of Nissan. Carlos Ghosn is a Brazilian-born Lebanese businessman who held
French nationality. He after undertaking the responsibility at Nissan made it very profitable and
one of the top 10 automobile company in the world. Nissan as a company was established in
Japan as the name of Jidosha-Seizo Kabushiki-Kaisha during 1933 (Bird, 2019). Then shortly
after that the name Nissan was adopted by the company in 1934.
After Ghosn took over Nissan he had to face national culture issue as there were doubts
regarding how a non-Japanese COO would be able to manage the Japanese cultural obstacles.
These issues included general barriers of difference in culture and consensus decision making
and its relationship to career advancement. In Japan the conscientiousness and cooperation were
said to be the key elements towards maintaining operational efficiency and group harmony. It
often resulted in delay in decision making process and other efforts towards achieving consensus.
According to the Japanese professionals they should avoid making any mistake at all costs for
protecting their career growth. Apart from this he faces certain corporate culture issues which
were lack of clear profit orientation, insufficient focus on customers, lack of vision and poor
cross functional management at Nissan.
In order to overcome these challenges Ghosn utilized some of his philosophies towards
management such as having transparency. According to which followers are said to believe in
leader when they have transparency. Ghosn believed in 95% execution and 5% strategy which
was considered to be directly measurable for improving quality, costs and customer satisfaction.
Communication of the company was towards setting up of direction and priorities that get in the
way of effort. Ghosn introduced Cross functionality at Nissan which changed a lot at a Japanese
cultured organization. Cross functional teams (CFT) were his powerful tool towards turning
Nissan around. With the help of CFT it took just six months within which a sense of urgency was
increased in the different departments. The main focused areas of development for Ghosn were,
development of new automobiles and markets, improvement of the brand image of Nissan,
investing into the research and development and reduction of costs.
It was called the NRP (Nissan Revival Plan) for which Ghosn closed five factors and
brought a reduction of 21000 jobs. As the Japanese culture tended to have lifelong employment
in their culture, so Ghosn received a lot of criticism (Alam, 2021). NRP also broke other
Japanese cultural norm of keiretsu investment however, it maintained a customer supplier
relation with keiretsu partners. It helped the business reduce its costs after selling keiretsu
investments. NRP was able to achieve a success of 20% reduction in the purchasing costs. After
the Launch of Nissan 180 the number of car models which made the company profit increased
from 4 to 18 out of 36.