Carlos ghosn (nissan)

The Global leadership of Carlos Ghosn at Nissan
Success factors of Nissan’s turnaround
Nissan’s and Ghosn’s stories could be at first understood just as an ability to merge the best elements ofdifferent cultures. However, what Nissan achieved under Ghosn’s leadership was a change in vision and deep rooted practices by employees challenging their assumptions and pushing their thoughts forward.Nissan’s NRP success is based on:
* Change from consensus based decision-making to decisions based on root-cause analyses across departments. Not only through the formation of CFTs was Nissan able tochange this practice but by being able to implement a risk-taking perspective from its employees. The fact that employees were disciplined much more strongly for inaccurate or poor data thanmisjudgment clearly was a detonator for some of the “harsh medicine” prescriptions by some CFTs.
* Move from a tunneled vision of “regaining market share” to an active focus on customer satisfaction.Through CFTs, middle and lower managers understood that the achieving the measures of success of their own departments were meaningless to the company unless they were connected to other departments andhave a final result in customer attraction and retention.
* By moving the vision of the company to an orientation towards customer attraction and retention, former practices that were deeply rootedon Japanese culture could be challenged without challenging the culture itself. Nissan moving away from keiretsu investments is a clear example. Since these investments were compromising capitalwithout generating a direct benefit for company’s operations, it was “easily” defendable that they didn’t make sense. The same for employee promotion based not on age and legacy in the company anymore buton performance and results.
* Extreme focus on implementation and operations rather than on strategizing. After CFTs’ recommendations they were directly responsible to watch the on-going revival...