Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival - Hardcover

Ghosn, Carlos; Ries, Philippe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385512902 ISBN 13: 9780385512909

Verlag: Crown Pub, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The independent, much-admired CEO of Nissan offers a detailed account of how he challenged the traditional thinking and practices of Japanese business and describes the rule-breaking, risk-taking strategies that he used to revitalize the troubled corporation and turn it around from the brink of bankruptcy. 30,000 first printing.

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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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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Pub
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385512902
• ISBN 13: 9780385512909
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar