After Carlos Ghosn’s dramatic turnaround at Nissan, profits soar and “Ghosnmania” sweeps Japan. But signs of trouble emerge as he takes over as the CEO of both Renault and Nissan in 2005. Soon, Ghosn’s high pay creates controversy in Japan and France, where executive compensation is traditionally less exorbitant.
In part two of a special, four-part series, host Curt Nickisch explores Ghosn’s management style to learn what made him uniquely successful: his stellar communication skills, eye for talent, and focus on aggressive goals. But would some of these leadership qualities eventually contribute to his downfall?
NOTE: If you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, we recommend you start there. It’s episode 800 of the HBR IdeaCast podcast.
These episodes ask how Carlos Ghosn went from being one of the world’s most admired CEOs to a fugitive from justice. What went right — and wrong — during Ghosn’s time leading Nissan and Renault? And what can we learn from it?
This special series is inspired and informed by the new book Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars that Upended an Auto Empire.
This episode was produced by Anne Saini. Contributing reporting from Tokyo by Collision Course coauthors Hans Greimel and William Sposato.
Editing by Scott Berinato, Maureen Hoch, and Adi Ignatius. Sound engineering by Tim Skoog. The team includes Sally Ashworth, Adam Buchholz, Rob Eckhardt, Ramsey Khabbaz, Scott LaPierre, Christine Liu, Melinda Merino, and Karen Player.
[SOUND OF 2007 TOKYO MOTOR SHOW NISSAN PRESS BRIEFING]
CURT NICKISCH: In the car industry, giving an auto show speech is one of the trickiest maneuvers a CEO has to pull off. Hundreds of journalists from around the world cram an auditorium, standing room only. They’re all jet-lagged, hungover, and footsore from the conference floor. So you put on a multimedia presentation dripping with marketing dollars and tell yourself it’s showtime. At the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, Carlos Ghosn drove onto the stage in a new sports car. The 57-year-old with jet black hair stepped out, adjusted his suit jacket, gave a wry smile, and launched into his speech.
SOUND OF GHOSN’S SPEECH AT THE 2007 TOKYO MOTOR SHOW: What you hear is the roar of Nissan’s passion for performance. What you see is its ultimate physical expression, the all-new Nissan GTR.
CURT NICKISCH: It might have been one of the best performances of his career. Ghosn launched five new models of cars in about eight minutes. One moment he was hyping a high-performance sports car. The next he’s touting an all-electric vehicle, the precursor to the Nissan LEAF.
SOUND OF GHOSN’S SPEECH AT THE 2007 TOKYO MOTOR SHOW: In terms of emissions, though, ultimately, it’s got to be zero. The only way to get there soon is with electricity. And it’s going to come first in urban commuter vehicles.
CURT NICKISCH: To write the speech, you have to know the voice of the company, and you really have to know the voice of the CEO.
JOHN HARRIS: My name is John Harris. And for three years, I was the speechwriter for Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan.
CURT NICKISCH: John Harris is a Canadian who still lives in Japan, mainly working for foreign executives, helping them to communicate their vision.
JOHN HARRIS: Some CEOs will tell you, ‘I want this, this, this.” And they’ll spend a lot of time with you, and tell you their thoughts, and be very hands-on. Ghosn’s approach was, “Send me something. I will tell you if it’s wrong.” And so the first draft was always like golf in the fog. You never knew, but you had to be close to the green or you’re in trouble.
CURT NICKISCH: Par 4 was the magic number. Harris’s goal was to get any speech done in four drafts. To be able to do that, he says he had to listen and study Ghosn quite a bit to try to inhabit his voice.
JOHN HARRIS: Carlos Ghosn speaks in a very precise way. He will never use superlatives. You cannot say “very” anything, and “these results are great.” “This number is significant,” is what he would say.
CURT NICKISCH: It was also significant that Harris was writing speeches in English, which is not Ghosn’s native language. His first languages were Arabic and Portuguese, but also French. Like many Lebanese, Ghosn’s mother was a Francophile. She spoke exquisite French. And importantly, Harris says, Carlos Ghosn later studied in Paris.
JOHN HARRIS: Since French is not a foreign language to me, I’ve been speaking, I went to kindergarten in French, when he says, on the level of technology, I know he means au niveau de technologie. So I would always have to look for the more Latinate mode of expression in writing for him.
CURT NICKISCH: He also tried to adapt to Ghosn’s pace of speaking.
JOHN HARRIS: In French, they speak incredibly fast. And much faster than in English.
CURT NICKISCH: Harris says, Ghosn would speak around 170 words a minute in English, which he said made the CEO, who was very rational, sound somewhat less rational. He tried to coach Ghosn to speak closer to 130 words per minute.
JOHN HARRIS: So I would put in the middle of his speeches all caps, “SLOW DOWN.”
CURT NICKISCH: For Harris, it was an intriguing exercise in the humanities, to discover Carlos Ghosn through his verbal expressions and try to magnify his unique voice – and to translate that style and pace to a speech in English. But in the end, Harris knew his speechwriting work came down, not to humanities, but to a pretty simple economic equation.
JOHN HARRIS: Securities analysts told me that the notional value of [Ghosn’s] hour had to be somewhere between $150,000 and $250,000. So my key metric was, don’t waste his time.
CURT NICKISCH: That Tokyo Motor Show speech, by the way?
JOHN HARRIS: We did it in five drafts, which was unheard of.
CURT NICKISCH: This is The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch. This is the second episode in a four-part series. If you haven’t listened to the first one yet, I recommend you go back and listen in order. Part 1 is Episode 800 of the HBR IdeaCast. In this episode, we’re going to learn more about who Carlos Ghosn is and what made him uniquely successful. What was his management style? How did he build on his stellar rescue of Nissan? Was he really so good that he could run two companies at the same time? And are there any clues in his leadership or the choices he made to why he’d later be arrested? We want to know what turned one of the world’s most visionary CEOs into a fugitive?
CURT NICKISCH: After Carlos Ghosn turned around Nissan, “Ghosnmania” swept through Japan. Comic books featured him. He was constantly giving TV interviews. Newspapers dissected his management style. Restaurants served bento boxes with sushi carved to look like his face.
WILLIAM SPOSATO: It wasn’t just mania. There was a practical side to this as well.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s William Sposato. Back then he was the Tokyo bureau chief for Reuters. Today he’s a co-author of a new book on Carlos Ghosn titled, Collison Course. He says Ghosn came in at a time when not just Nissan, but many Japanese companies, were floundering.
WILLIAM SPOSATO: The Japanese economy had never seen a problem like this. They had never seen a ten-year downturn that they couldn’t explain and couldn’t handle on their own.
CURT NICKISCH: So at a time when many Japanese are not feeling so confident, here comes this guy brimming with bravado and turns it into results.
WILLIAM SPOSATO: Obviously that’s the stuff of legend.
CURT NICKISCH: Ghosn may have been speaking to a need in Japan, but he was not simply bringing Nissan back to its glory days. He was building a new Nissan. He actively cultivated the younger generation of managers, those who otherwise would have had to wait longer for their turn at seniority. He changed the official company language from Japanese to English, and he started pulling in talent from the company’s North American and European offices, including a deputy managing director named Andy Palmer. Ghosn had noticed him on a visit to a company engineering facility in Sunderland in England.
ANDY PALMER: I got a call from Ghosn’s office saying, “I’d like you to come to Japan next month.” And I went, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll come.” And he said, “No, you misunderstand. I want you to come and live in Japan next month.”
CURT NICKISCH: It was one of those fateful phone calls where your career goes in a new direction. Without Ghosn’s eye for talent and development, Palmer says he would not have gone on to become the COO of Nissan or later the CEO of Aston Martin. Plus, he said he never would have become a race car driver.
ANDY PALMER: We were getting hit fairly hard by the press for not particularly good journalist reviews of our vehicles. And Ghosn asked the question at one of the executive committees of who’s responsible for marketability? Because we’re not doing a very good job because we’re not getting the five stars. And it was the engineering head, Yamashita-san at the time, and he said, “I am.” And Ghosn said, “I’d like that marketability role to transfer to Andy.”
CURT NICKISCH: That was vintage Carlos Ghosn, a rational management call communicated directly and clearly to all those involved. Now, the truth is that Andy Palmer didn’t know what to do. He was a trained engineer just like Yamashita. But Carlos Ghosn had confidence in him, and that gave him confidence. So he decided to find out why journalists were feeling three stars instead of five stars when they drove Nissan cars.
ANDY PALMER: It was clear that what we needed to do was to get the cars closer to the limit. And that started by going out and getting race trained and basically learning to drift cars and all the hooning around that journalists tend to do. And then to refine that skill, I went on to race, and that stuck.
CURT NICKISCH: Palmer says that by learning to race cars and not just engineer them, he got better at the business.
ANDY PALMER: That was a result of that Ghosn call. I found working for him, I would go as far to say, as inspirational. I modeled a lot of what I learned in my management career based upon things that I learned from him.
CURT NICKISCH: And there are just so many stories like that. People who worked with Carlos Ghosn, especially in these early years, describe him as focused, clear, direct, and neutral. Management in motion. Like when Ghosn was looking for someone to remake Nissan’s styling, instead of bringing in some fancy French or Italian car designer, Ghosn hired away Isuzu’s designer, an underutilized talent in Japan.
HANS GREIMEL: Obviously he stands out as a completely different animal from any other auto executive, and almost any other executive, period, in Japan.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Hans Greimel, the Tokyo-based reporter we heard from in the last episode. He also co-wrote that new book about Ghosn, Collision Course. He says, unlike most Japanese executives, Ghosn was great to interview, very media-friendly, never shirked difficult questions.
HANS GREIMEL: And he can back up his message with facts and figures, almost like a supercomputer. You know, I often compare him to a human supercomputer because his brain is packed with all kinds of facts and figures that he can just pull out at a moment’s notice and fling at his audience. And it’s very impressive how he communicates.
CURT NICKISCH: Add to that Ghosn’s reputation as a hard worker. He earned yet another nickname in Japan, “Seven-Eleven,” for his rumored work hours, seven in the morning to eleven at night.
REGIS ARNAUD: As we say in French, he has a clock in the stomach.
CURT NICKISCH: Regis Arnaud is the Japan correspondent for the French newspaper, Le Figaro.
REGIS ARNAUD: He divides his time into small slices of 15 minutes over two years, and he solves one problem after another, like a machine.
CURT NICKISCH: And Yann Rousseau, Tokyo correspondent for the French economic newspaper, Les Echos, says people at Nissan told him three subjects interest Carlos Ghosn.
YANN ROUSSEAU: The first one is business. The second one is business. And the third one is business. So it’s never personal. It’s always, with journalists, with his team, with his colleagues, it’s all about business. He’s very secretive. He has his family life. He doesn’t mix the two.
CURT NICKISCH: Back in France, Renault CEO Louis Schweitzer was looking ahead to stepping down. Remember in the first episode, he had told Ghosn in their introductory meeting that if Carlos succeeded, he would be the next CEO of Renault? And in 2002, after the Nissan revival, it was obvious, right? Schweitzer announced publicly that Ghosn was his successor, starting in 2005. And as part of this succession planning, Schweitzer prepared Ghosn to lead the French car company.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: At the time he had a double nationality. He was Brazilian and Lebanese. And I told him, “I think it’s a good idea that you take up the French nationality without giving up another nationality because I believe the CEO of Renault should be French.” And this he did.
CURT NICKISCH: Schweitzer also worked to introduce Ghosn to the French establishment. Being able to schmooze with politicians and civic leaders kind of goes with the territory at a company with historical ties to the government.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: Doors were opened to him, but let’s say he did not very much enjoy it. I believe he never felt completely at ease with the French establishment.
CURT NICKISCH: Schweitzer didn’t push this very hard because he came to realize that Ghosn not only did not want to bump shoulders with the French elite, he didn’t need to. It’s not like their influence and connections would help him get ahead. He was already ahead. He was successful alone.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: You know, at one point in time there was, I believe, a dinner where [Ghosn] made a speech. And one of the persons present asked him, “What advice would you give to the government in this case?” And he said, “I don’t give advice to governments.” And quite frankly, people said how modest he is. No, he’s not the one who gives advice. He’s the one who decides.
CURT NICKISCH: That self-assurance carried over in many other ways. Former NPR auto industry reporter, Sonari Glinton, remembers interviewing Ghosn at an auto show.
SONARI GLINTON: You get the sense that they weren’t telling him what to do. And that’s a very interesting place to be when the PR people don’t even necessarily have say in what you say. Let me put it this way. The Big Three car companies: General Motors, Toyota, and Volkswagen – those CEOs better not go off-script. Right? And that’s a style.
CURT NICKISCH: Ghosn had his own style, and there was another way that he went off-script. His speechwriter, John Harris, who worked with other CEOs, like the head of Mazda when Ford was running it, remembers this about him.
JOHN HARRIS: The thing about Mr. Ghosn is there is never any small talk. Like Mark Fields would come in, like, “Hey, what about those Yankees?” Right? He was a baseball fan. And “how are your kids doing?” And stuff like that. But Mr. Ghosn would come, we’d all be sitting around a table, a board room table, and he’d come in, and he’d sit down and say one word in French. He’d say, “bon.” And then it would be into English.
CURT NICKISCH: For Nissan team member Hiroto Saikawa, that was refreshing.
HIROTO SAIKAWA: He is busy, and I am busy. And not necessarily his style is, you know, “Oh Saikawa-san, come with me.” His style is more like “You do your job and report it to me.”
ANDY PALMER: You never really got personally close to Carlos Ghosn.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Andy Palmer again.
ANDY PALMER: Really, everybody would refer to him as Mr. Ghosn, not Carlos. Some people would pretend to call him Carlos, but you know, they were probably not as close as people that called him Mr. Ghosn, if I’m being honest. Even he referred to himself as Mr. Ghosn, which was one of those odd points about him.
CURT NICKISCH: This may have been odd, but it was a known oddity. Louis Schweitzer had observed this back when Ghosn was still at Renault. The executive team there would meet regularly.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: We met every week for a number of hours, lunch, a French working lunch, which is not an American working lunch. And we had a monthly seminar in a nice hotel in the vicinity of Paris, in the Fontainebleau. And the fact was that Carlos Ghosn never mingled with his colleagues. You know, he never was part of the group.
CURT NICKISCH: Schweitzer says this single-mindedness was a strength of Ghosn, but possibly also a weakness.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: He was very reserved and focused, focused, focused. And therefore, his colleagues considered him as a sort of a weird animal, if you see what I mean. You know, coming from outer space or whatever.
CURT NICKISCH: That didn’t matter so much to Schweitzer. Ghosn was unconventional and got unconventional results. But when 2005 rolls around, and Schweitzer is ready to step down as CEO, that’s when the plan for Carlos Ghosn starts to break down.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: Carlos Ghosn has a different memory of that than I have, but I’m quite certain my memory is correct. It is that we had agreed that when he would come back to France, he would relinquish his position as Nissan because I felt, and he apparently agreed, that you cannot manage two different companies 10,000 kilometers apart.
CURT NICKISCH: Schweitzer says if Renault and Nissan had merged, this would be a different story. They shared some capabilities, but they were really two different companies. They kept separate profit and loss statements. Being the CEO of both companies at the same time would basically be like taking on a second job. For this human supercomputer who had such a command of numbers, Ghosn obviously should be able to calculate a simple fraction.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: He had to spend a third of his time at Nissan in Japan, a third of his time in the [United] States, which was a major issue for Nissan, and a third of the time at Renault. And that’s simply not enough because also Ghosn did not like to have a very strong Number Two. His strength was direct management. And you cannot do this part-time.
CURT NICKISCH: So Schweitzer planned for Ghosn to give up being the CEO of Nissan and become the CEO of Renault instead. But it’s hard to blame him for not wanting to do that. With the revival, Nissan was now way bigger, much more profitable than Renault. Also, Ghosn was practically a demigod in Japan. They were carving sushi in his likeness.
REGIS ARNAUD: And in France, he was disliked.
CURT NICKISCH: Le Figaro Japan correspondent, Regis Arnaud.
REGIS ARNAUD: He was not liked at all, either from the public, because he had closed some factories, and this does not make you more popular in France. He was seen as a kind of globalization icon, and France does not like that much globalization. He was a boss, and France doesn’t like bosses. The politicians didn’t like him, and he didn’t like them, and he did not try to please them at all.
CURT NICKISCH: Schweitzer began to realize that he didn’t have much leverage. He’d already named Carlos as his successor, and Renault owned more than 40 percent of Nissan. The French may not have liked Ghosn, but they loved the Nissan dividends. Ghosn was well aware of that. And to hear Schweitzer tell it, Carlos pulled a fast one.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: So when 2005 came, and the time came for him to become CEO of Renault, he told me, “Well, the guy I had pinpointed that we had discussed for my successor at Nissan, finally he is not up to standards. And so I need a few more months to find somebody else.” And of course, this never happened.
CURT NICKISCH: The best candidate is me. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: That, I think, was a mistake.
CURT NICKISCH: Do you feel any responsibility for that?
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: Well, quite frankly, I have asked myself this question quite often.
CURT NICKISCH: Coming up after the break.
SADAAKI NUMATA: It has been said about Japan’s culture that a nail that sticks out gets hammered down very quickly.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s when The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn continues.
CURT NICKISCH: In 2005, Ghosn took over from Schweitzer as CEO of Renault. That meant he was running two global companies eight time zones apart. Nissan and Renault had a total workforce of more than 250,000 people. And with this second job, Carlos Ghosn was now drawing two salaries. How much was he making?
YANN ROUSSEAU: We don’t know publicly how much money he makes at Nissan.
CURT NICKISCH: French journalist Yann Rousseau again. He says back then, executives in Japan were not required to disclose their pay, unlike in France.
YANN ROUSSEAU: [At] Renault, we know exactly — he’s going to make two or three million euros a year. Already it’s a scandal for the French. I mean, the French are complaining – the workers, the trade unions, the governments. “It’s too much.” But we understand, at the same time, he’s paying himself 15, 16, 17 million US dollars in Japan to be the CEO of Nissan.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s comparable to what Ghosn’s counterparts in the U.S. were making but it’s an order of magnitude more than what CEOs were getting in Japan. Hitotsubashi University professor Masako Egawa says her country has a history of paying executives far less than those in the U.S. or Europe.
MASAKO EGAWA: Companies have been seen as a community, and the CEO is the leader of the community. So it’s very important for that leader to have sort of a reasonable relationship, a close relationship with the employees. And I think probably there was a feeling that the CEO would be motivated by an inherent wish to bring prosperity to the company and employees, rather than getting a big pay.
CURT NICKISCH: That tradition, she says, has to do with Japan’s system of seniority promotion. You often join a company out of university and advance through the ranks. When someone gets promoted to an executive role, it’s not like they’re suddenly that much more valuable than you. Too much pay would create distance between you and the new leader. But Carlos Ghosn did not come from that system, and he didn’t come from that tradition. Louis Schweitzer says, even though French norms are similar to Japan’s, Ghosn really liked the U.S. system, where the free market and performance incentives determine CEO pay.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: That Carlos liked money, I knew that. I mean, when I sent him to Nissan, he asked for a number of options, which the Japanese thought we had made a mistake in the number of zeros. It’s OK. That’s the American style. I mean, it’s not my style. But I accepted this as an element of the, I would say, the culture of Carlos Ghosn.
CURT NICKISCH: Starting in 2010, we get more information on Ghosn’s compensation. A new law in Japan requires disclosure of any salary above 100 million yen. That’s around $1 million. And that year Nissan reported that Ghosn earned nearly ten times that threshold. That’s low for an auto company CEO globally, but extremely high for Japan. The CEO of Toyota didn’t even meet the threshold that year. Former ambassador Sadaaki Numata says that Ghosn’s salary became a matter of public debate.
SADAAKI NUMATA: It has been said about Japan’s culture that a nail that sticks out gets hammered down very quickly. And it all has to do with respect for harmony, our preference for harmony. And if somebody earns too much money, he does stick out.
CURT NICKISCH: At Nissan shareholders meetings, there were often questions about the high pay. In 2014, Ghosn defended his compensation in a talk with journalists in Tokyo.
SOUND OF CARLOS GHOSN AT PRESS EVENT: People look at this by saying, “Yeah, but in Japan, you have the highest salary in Japan.” Yes, it’s true. But at the same time, Nissan cannot be considered only a Japanese company.
CURT NICKISCH: Ghosn’s point was that Nissan was a global company now. It was sitting on billions of dollars in cash. So when you’re trying to hire some top talent, it’s kind of ridiculous to say, “We can’t really pay you what Volkswagen will pay you.” Even so, Ghosn said that he recognized what he called the “sensitivity” in France and Japan.
SOUND OF CARLOS GHOSN AT PRESS EVENT: Now, this has to be done in a way which is not provocative. You’re not irking the sensitivity. It’s a kind of fine art.
CURT NICKISCH: A kind of a fine art, he said, to pay people what they deserve in a sensitive, non-provocative way. What does that mean, exactly? How do you pay somebody what they deserve in a non-provocative way? That’s kind of interesting, honestly, knowing what we know now, that Ghosn was later accused of hiding his pay.
[SOUND OF OCTOBER 22, 2010 NISSAN LEAF OFFLINE CEREMONY AT NISSAN’S OPPAMA PLANT]
In 2010, Carlos Ghosn once again drove a car onto a stage, this time at a factory for the all-new Nissan LEAF, right off the production line.
[SOUND OF CARLOS GHOSN SPEAKING JAPANESE AT OCTOBER 22, 2010 NISSAN LEAF OFFLINE CEREMONY AT NISSAN’S OPPAMA PLANT]
Reading from notes, Ghosn addressed the frontline workers in Japanese. He said the innovative high-quality electric car will radically transform what consumers expect from global carmakers.
HANS GREIMEL: And he was in that sense a visionary of electric vehicles.
CURT NICKISCH: Hans Greimel, again.
HANS GREIMEL: You know, at that time, other companies were openly criticizing and just writing off EVs [electric vehicles] as glorified golf carts. But Ghosn was unique in saying, “No, there is a market for these, and Nissan will be a leader in it.”
CURT NICKISCH: Greimel says by doing so, Ghosn was trying to leapfrog Toyota, Japan’s number one car maker. Toyota had come out with the Prius hybrid vehicles.
HANS GREIMEL: And there was a real sense at the time that Nissan was jealous of Toyota. That Toyota was getting all these accolades for being the ultimate green company, the ultimate socially responsible, environmentally forward-thinking company, and Nissan wasn’t. And this was seen as a way to try to wrest that title, that mantle away from [Toyota].
CURT NICKISCH: This was a pretty bold bid. Toyota had gone about this transition in a more incremental way, combining battery power with internal combustion engines. Nissan was jumping straight to all-electric, and way ahead of almost everybody else. U.S. journalist Sonari Glinton says there are bigger car companies still today, a decade later, that don’t even have electric vehicles.
SONARI GLINTON: That, to me, in the estimation of the future will be, and historically will be, way more significant. Because that car, it wasn’t the world’s greatest car. Who wants a Nissan LEAF that barely can get you from Ann Arbor to – I mean, seriously, barely got me from Ann Arbor to Detroit. But it was out there, and they put their money into it.
CURT NICKISCH: And going electric is a really challenging business problem, innovating a disruptive technology at a legacy firm is about one of the hardest things you can do in business. Way harder than coming into a good car company that was poorly managed and turning it around. So some people say, “Give Ghosn credit.” He wasn’t there just drawing a salary or drawing two salaries and coasting along. He was still pushing Nissan beyond its comfort zone.
CURT NICKISCH: Another way that Ghosn was ahead of his time – he crafted an auto company alliance that actually worked. Other global merges like Daimler-Chrysler had fallen apart in spectacular fashion. Renault and Nissan may have had their struggles, but Ghosn had largely kept these two distant, disparate car companies in synch and making money. Rick Johnson, of Automotive News, remembers that at the outset of the financial crisis, Ghosn started getting phone calls from Detroit – first from Ford, then GM.
RICK JOHNSON: General Motors and Nissan talked about it for about 90 days, about an alliance. And I remember there was, it was very famous. Ghosn and Rick Wagoner, then the [General Motors] CEO, had a dinner at a restaurant not too far from where I live. And it was, we were all trying to see what was going on. The thought was that maybe if General Motors and Renault-Nissan do come together, Carlos Ghosn would probably emerge kind of like he did with Nissan in Tokyo and take over General Motors. And my thought has always been, that might not have been a bad thing. There may never have been the need for a bailout, and the history of the industry might have been quite different.
CURT NICKISCH: But that very public meeting set off alarm bells in Paris and in Tokyo. Louis Schweitzer was still the chair of Renault at the time. He already thought Ghosn had bitten off more than he could chew by leading two companies at the same time.
LOUIS SCHWEITZER: The fact that he wanted to be the chairman and CEO of Renault and Nissan and at one point of time, between 2005 and 2009, he wanted also to have General Motors joining the group – you know, it showed that he had lost touch with reality.
CURT NICKISCH: Which was it? Was Ghosn a visionary? Or was he losing touch with reality? Coming up in the next episode, Carlos Ghosn spends even more time on Nissan’s corporate jet.
CARLOS GHOSN ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW IN 2014: When you’re traveling the whole time, because I’m every month in Paris and in Tokyo, people don’t care if you are jet-lagged or if you’re coming out of a plane. They see the CEO, and they just want him to be fresh and ready to make decisions, etc.
CHARLIE ROSE ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW IN 2014: And they want his ear, so they want their time with him.
CARLOS GHOSN ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW IN 2014: Exactly.
CHARLIE ROSE ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW IN 2014: Do you have a secret to jet lag?
CARLOS GHOSN ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW IN 2014: No, unfortunately. There is no secret.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s on the next episode of The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review.
CURT NICKISCH: This episode was produced by Anne Saini. Contributing reporting from Tokyo by Hans Greimel and William Sposato. Their new book is Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars that Upended an Auto Empire. Our editors are Scott Berinato, Maureen Hoch, and Adi Ignatius. Sound engineering by Tim Skoog. Our team includes Sally Ashworth, Adam Buchholz, Rob Eckhardt, Ramsay Khabbaz, Scott LaPierre, Christine Liu, Melinda Merino, and Karen Player. I’m Curt Nickisch. Please join us for the next episode of The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review.