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Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival (Paperback)
by Carlos Ghosn
| Category:
Biography, Corporate history, Automobile industry, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 148.00
MSL price:
¥ 128.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A highly recommended book for those interested in leadership and management. |
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Author: Carlos Ghosn
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Pub. in: March, 2006
ISBN: 0385512910
Pages: 256
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01309
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0385512916
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the MSL Top 10 recommendations for MBAs and managers. |
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- MSL Picks -
Shift is the memoirs of Carlos Ghosn (rhymes with "phone"), who masterminded the turnaround of the failing Japanese automotive giant, Nissan Motor Company, back to profitability.
Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian of Lebanese descent, takes you from his childhood to his employment with Michelin and subsequent move to Renault. It was at Renault where he earned his reputation as a turnaround manager and his nickname "Le Cost Killer." Ghosn's story continues to the alliance formed between Renault and Nissan and his new role as COO of the struggling Japanese automaker. Finally, the author takes you behind the scenes of his famous Nissan Revival Plan and shares his thoughts on the restructuring plan that shook the Japanese auto industry and the media.
Only the latter half of this book is devoted to the specifics of the revival of Nissan, so don't expect a lot of details. Still, the book was fascinating, and I recommend it to anyone who is familiar with Carlos Ghosn and to people interested in the auto industry, management or Japanese business.
(From quoting D. Ogawa, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government leaders, management consultants, academics and MBAs.
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CARLOS GHOSN joined Nissan as COO in June 1999, became president a year later, and in 2001 assumed the position of president and CEO. Born in Brazil to Lebanese immigrants, he was educated in France, where he earned engineering degrees from Ècole Polytechnique and Ècole des Mines de Paris. He was chief operating officer of Michelin in Brazil before becoming COO of Renault and then taking over the reins of Nissan. In the spring of 2005, Ghosn will become the CEO of Nissan’s parent company, Renault, while continuing as CEO of Nissan.
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From Publisher
In Shift, Carlos Ghosn, the brilliant, audacious, and widely admired CEO of Nissan, recounts how he took the reins of the nearly bankrupt Japanese automotive company and achieved one of the most remarkable turnarounds in automotive-and corporate-history.
When Carlos Ghosn (pronounced like “phone”) was named COO of Nissan in 1999, the company was running out of gas and careening toward bankruptcy. Eighteen short months later, Nissan was back in the black, and within several more years it had become the most profitable large automobile company in the world. In SHIFT, Ghosn describes how he went about accomplishing the seemingly impossible, transforming Nissan once again into a powerful global automotive manufacturer.
The Brazilian-born, French-educated son of Lebanese parents, Ghosn first learned the management principles and practices that would shape his decisions at Nissan while rising through the ranks at Michelin and Renault. Upon his arrival at Nissan, Ghosn began his new position by embarking on a three-month intensive examination of every aspect of the business. By October 1999 he was ready to announce his strategy to turn the company around with the Nissan Revival Plan. In the plan, he consistently challenged the tradition-bound thinking and practices of Japanese business when they inhibited Nissan’s effectiveness. Ghosn closed plants, laid off workers, broke up long-standing supply networks, and sold off marginal assets to focus on the company’s core business. But slashing costs was just the first step in Nissan’s recovery. In fact, Ghosn introduced changes in every corner of the company, from manufacturing and engineering to marketing and sales. He updated Nissan’s car and truck lineup, took risks on dynamic new designs, and demanded improvements in quality-strategies that quickly burnished Nissan’s image in the marketplace, and re-established the company in the minds of consumers as a leader in innovation and engineering.
Like the best-selling memoirs of Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner, and Larry Bossidy, SHIFT is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to transform and re-create a world-class company. Written by one of the world’s most successful and acclaimed CEOs, SHIFT is an invaluable guide for business readers everywhere.
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Chapter 1
Departure
My grandfather, Bichara Ghosn, emigrated from Lebanon to Brazil when he was thirteen years old. He traveled alone. In those days, people left when they were still comparatively young. Going to school didn't seem so important.
At the time, the country was still part of the Ottoman Empire, which extended from Turkey to the Arabian Peninsula and the banks of the Nile. But it was an empire that was breathing its last. Distant and corrupt, Constantinople had trouble maintaining order in its far-flung provinces. There were several waves of emigration from Lebanon at the beginning of the twentieth century. The two primary reasons were conflicts based on religious differences--Druzes (a sect of Shi'a Islam) against Maronites, Sunnis against Shi'a--and endemic poverty. My grandfather came from Kesrouan, the part of Mount Lebanon that was 100% Maronite. The Maronites place a very high value on loyalty, especially loyalty to the Church, and respect for traditions. The Maronite mass has always been said in Syriac, for example. Although it's a language no one speaks anymore, it was the language Christ spoke. Maronite traditions and loyalty have been passed down from generation to generation. The Maronites who emigrated have maintained their loyalty to Lebanon and to their family members who stayed in the old country. They send money. They pay to construct a house in their ancestral village and visit it from time to time. The Lebanese Maronites are also loyal to France, which is the result of a long, nearly thousand-year-old history that goes back to the Crusades.
When you live in a world of constant menace, your close family circle is the one place where you're protected, where you can affirm your identity, which is always under threat from the Muslims, from invasions, and from the divisions between rival factions in Lebanon itself.
In the villages, the means of subsistence were limited, families were large, and land was scarce. The young had no prospects. Like so many others, my grandfather realized that he couldn't provide for himself if he stayed in Lebanon. One family member probably told him about a cousin or friend in Brazil, while another one spoke of someone he knew who'd gone to the United States and made his fortune.
"Making your fortune," of course, didn't mean becoming a millionaire; it meant finding a steady job, making enough income to begin and provide for a family, and assure the children a good education.
One fine day at the beginning of the twentieth century, my grandfather left his village, walked down the mountain, on his way to a ship in port at Beirut. After a crossing that took three months, he arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; he was nearly illiterate, he didn't have a cent, and he spoke only one language, Arabic.
Rio de Janeiro was the city where the people who'd made their money in the provinces went to take up residence and enjoy life. But the Brazilian El Dorado, at that time, was in the Amazon, in central and northwestern Brazil.
So Bichara shouldered his bag and set out for the new frontier, the territory of Guapore, near the border between Brazil and Bolivia. It later became the state of Rondonia, whose capital city, Porto Velho, lies on the Madeira River, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon River. It was there that he decided to set down his bag.
He went up and down the region, doing odd jobs. Little by little, he found his own way, started working for himself, and became an entrepreneur. At first, he bought and sold agricultural products; later, he went into the rubber trade. Hevea brasiliensis, the Brazilian rubber tree, was plentiful in those parts. Later still, he helped develop some of the Brazilian airlines that were establishing a countrywide network, acting as a local agent. He helped them to get to know the region and provided them with various services.
After many decades of hard work, in a country where he didn't know the language and started with nothing, he became the head of several companies. One of them traded in agricultural products, one of them was in the rubber business, and a third operated in air transport.
Although he is a very important person to me, I never knew my grandfather. I speak about him from hearsay, because he died relatively young at the age of fifty-three, long before I was born. He needed a gallbladder operation, and in those days, surgical resources in the Brazilian interior were primitive. He died on the operating table. But everyone who talked to me about him--my father, my uncles, and many other people who knew him--described him as a powerful personality. He was a genuine pioneer with a taste for taking risks. He had to make his way on his own when he was still very young, without money or knowledge or education. I admire him as someone who started with nothing, built himself a completely respectable life, educated his children properly, and left a decent inheritance, although quite small by today's standards.
But his inheritance bequeathed to his eight children, four boys and four girls, and his grandson was far more than his modest estate--they also inherited his example and his values.
He wasn't an ordinary man. He did some things that surprise me to this day. His contemporaries greatly respected him, and not only for his accomplishments. They admired him because he was a man of great integrity, a quality that was pretty rare in those days in the world of the pioneers. He was a man with principles and a family man; that's the way I think of him. His children were very attached to him. My father spoke of his father with a great deal of affection, as did my uncles and my aunts. He was someone who left a mark on their lives.
When my grandfather died, the family business was divided among his children. Many of them were already working for one or another of the companies. My father, Jorge, took over the businesses related to air travel.
Like most families in the Lebanese diaspora, our family maintained close ties to Lebanon. My grandfather's brothers and sisters and cousins stayed in Lebanon, as did his mother. Roughly every three years, our family returned to Lebanon.
Like many émigrés, my father went back to the old country to get married. When it's time for serious things in life, many emigres try to reaffirm the old values and traditions-especially when it comes to marriage, where family and religious values play such a large part. On one of his trips back to Lebanon, my father had obtained an introduction to a very reputable family, and that's how he met my mother. They got married in Lebanon, and she returned to Brazil with him to work and start a family themselves.
My mother, Rose, who has been called Zetta all her life, also came from a large family. They lived in the Lebanese mountains in the northern part of the country. Her father had immigrated to Nigeria, where she was born. But the schools in Nigeria were less than ideal, and so at a very young age she was sent to school in Lebanon. It was a common story. Her father stayed in Africa to work. He sent money to his family and returned to Lebanon from time to time, every two years, to spend the summer with them, before going back to Nigeria. That still happens frequently today, not only in Lebanon but also in many other countries of emigration.
Zetta attended school with the Sisters of Besaneon, one of the teaching orders that were the guardians of Catholic faith and French culture in Lebanon. For the Maronites of the Lebanon Mountains, France was something like a second home. My mother received a French education; she loves French culture and French music. For her, there's France, and then there's the rest of the world. Naturally, if you have a mother who's devoted to France, that's going to rub off on you. French culture runs deep in our family.
My mother and father took up residence in Porto Velho. It was there that my sister Claudine and I were born.
While the natural world around us was exotic, the climate was difficult. Mosquitoes, heat, humidity. Swimming in the river was out of the question. The water wasn't potable unless you boiled it before you drank it.
One day, the young girl who helped my mother around the house gave me some water that hadn't been boiled. I must have been around two. I got very sick, and I had a series of stomach disorders. The doctor told my mother, "If you want your child to have a normal life, you have to take him to a more temperate region, where daily conditions are easier and the water is healthier." My mother first took me to Rio, hoping I'd get better there. In fact, I did get a little better, but I was far from being completely cured. My father and mother decided that the only solution was for me to leave Brazil and live in Lebanon with my grandmother.
And so my family settled into a pattern typical of the Lebanese diaspora: My mother, sister, and I returned to Lebanon, while my father shuttled between Brazil and Lebanon. We lived the way a great many families do when the father goes to work in a difficult country. He earned enough money to place his family in another country, one where education is of a higher caliber and conditions are easier.
The Maronite community is one where feminine values are very strong, which obviously presents a contrast with the surrounding Arab world. The mother plays a very important role in the family and exercises a great deal of influence. There are many reasons why this is the case. It's often because the mother remains in Lebanon while the father works abroad. She becomes the authority figure. Father and mother relate to each other as equals. And considering many fathers' long absences, you can even say that the mother becomes the head of the family.
When we arrived in Beirut, I was six years old. I would remain in Lebanon until I was seventeen, finishing high school at a prestigious Jesuit institution, the College Notre-Dame.
Because my mother and father were Maronites, that is, Eastern Catholics, both o...
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-09 00:00>
When French auto manufacturer Renault acquired Nissan, they sent Ghosn to engineer the failing company's turnaround, and in short order, interviews and pictures of him were everywhere. The story behind his success is familiar to any reader of business publications, but he gives it here again, along with an extensive recitation of the business strategy that put the failing company back in black. Those who haven't heard the continent-hopping tale of Ghosn's family will be fascinated by the first few chapters, in which he talks about his Lebanese grandfather, who went to Brazil to make his fortune, and reminisces about his own childhood in Brazil and Lebanon. Though some readers may yearn for more details about Ghosn's childhood and his days attending university in Paris, Ghosn is all business. Indeed, his background information seems to have been included largely to establish him as a creature of globalization. The bulk of the book follows his progress at Nissan in dry terms, with short, declarative sentences moving the story efficiently but mechanically. Ghosn sprinkles in occasional passages about his business philosophy, briefly analyzing why Nissan went downhill under the traditional Japanese system and expounding on the necessity of communication, dedication and never hesitating. Nissan's resurgence was doubtless a relief for its shareholders and employees (at least the ones who survived Ghosn's downsizing), but there isn't likely to be a large readership for what, by the end, feels less like a book and more like a company's annual report, complete with history, statistics and vision for the future.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Booklist (MSL quote), USA
<2008-04-09 00:00>
In Turnaround (2003), David Magee profiled the dramatic comeback of Nissan Corporation under the leadership of international businessman Carlos Ghosn. Here Ghosn relates the story in his own words, first sharing some of his family background and previous experience in the auto industry working at Michelin and at Renault, where he earned a reputation as "le cost killer." Ghosn was chosen by Renault as the only possible candidate to implement the changes necessary to revitalize Nissan, which was suffering under a decade of decline and unprofitability. The Renault alliance with Nissan injected desperately needed cash and revolutionized the stagnated culture at the Japanese company. Although Nissan had technologically superior products, Ghosn found there was a distinct absence of vision and leadership. His Nissan Revival Plan would become a highly successful cultural intersection that created the most dramatic turnaround in automotive history. Ghosn's rapidly paced narrative concludes with his hopes for the future of Nissan, penetrating new segments of the market in SUVs, pickups, and hybrids, along with a much-hoped-for entrance into the Chinese market. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
The Boston Globe, USA
<2008-04-09 00:00>
If you want to grasp how Nissan rediscovered itself, Shift is the ticket . . . The kind of company Ghosn likes to run is well presented here. |
BusinessWeek, USA
<2008-04-09 00:00>
A trove of practical advice to executives who . . . find themselves in unfamiliar business cultures with different rules of engagement – and not much time to sort things out. |
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