Ghosn says all his work wasted at Nissan; says Musk could fix automaker

The ancient Greek tragedians would have made much of this character – or Shakespeare. Maybe no less a hand can do him justice. Macbeth, Oedipus, Ghosn. Few have risen higher, few fallen lower. That’s tragedy. Greatness is self-destructive.

Carlos Ghosn was a corporate wizard, a magician. One failing company after another he “turned around,” returned to profitability: Michelin, Renault, Nissan. He was wise like Oedipus, ambitious like Macbeth – and where is he now?

In Beirut, Lebanon, a fugitive. Everyone knows his story. Nissan, one of Japan’s big three automakers, had been given up for moribund when he took over as chief operating officer in 1999. It was 2 trillion yen in debt; its cars were not selling; “hopeless” was the general prognosis; who was fool enough to defy such odds? Ghosn. He was then Renault’s chief executive officer. Renault purchased a large stake in Nissan. Ghosn became Nissan’s chief operating officer. Give me a year, he said in effect. He would resign if he failed to make it profitable.

He was signing his death warrant, skeptics said. We who know how the story ends (if it has ended!) smile at the irony. Death indeed – the ultimate price of the immortality he won for himself. But back then his fall was far in the future. He had much higher to rise first. And rise he did – taking Nissan with him.

One satisfaction he can claim now in defeat, a kind of consolation prize: Nissan has fared badly since his ouster. Under post-Ghosn management it flounders on. Recent talks of a tie-up with rival Honda broke down over Honda’s condition that Nissan accept more or less subsidiary status. Some at least saw the merger – barring the advent of a Carlos the Second (but who can second a Carlos Ghosn?) – as a last hope. What now? That is what Shukan Post (Feb. 28 – March 7) seeks to know from Ghosn in a remote interview, Ghosn seated apparently at ease in his study at home in Beirut. At ease? At home? He’s currently appealing a Lebanese court order that he vacate the $19 million property, on which it says he’s trespassing. For the fallen great, there’s no end to falling.

“As sharp-tongued as ever,” is Shukan Post’s impression. He charges his successors with lacking vision, decision, clarity, judgment, insight. “All the work I and my team did there over 18 years is wasted,” he says bitterly – perhaps with a secret bitter satisfaction?

He’s optimistic in the long run. Inadequate managers come and go; better may come along. As for himself – a victim, he says (not unreasonably, say more than a few others), of Japan’s “corrupt” justice system – he anticipates ultimate vindication. “There is no problem that human beings can create that they cannot solve,” he tells Shukan Post. Nissan, he says, must not surrender to despair; nor will he. “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Also darkness in the midst of light. Few lights shone brighter than his. He had assumed an impossible task, defied impossible odds, steamrollered irresistible resistance, and prevailed. He was as ruthless as he felt his mission required him to be. He cut 21,000 jobs (14 percent of Nissan’s workforce) while paying himself an annual salary estimated to have peaked at close to a billion yen; he shut down five plants; he abolished traditional age-based promotion, trashed traditional lifetime employment. He made many enemies. The leader not prepared to do that is not suited for leadership, he would surely say. He was suited. He did it. He triumphed.

At the peak of his fame, at the height of his glory, it all came crashing down on him. Suddenly he was in handcuffs, off to jail. Arrested in November 2018 on charges of financial malfeasance, he was to spend 108 days behind bars, his applications for bail persistently denied, rearrested on charge after charge, held under conditions more than a few said mocked Japan’s claim to be a respecter of human rights. Bail granted at last, he was released, if the strict surveillance imposed permits one to speak of “release.”

The drama had scarcely begun. In December 2019 he vanished, resurfacing days later in Beirut – he’d been stuffed into a crate and carried onto a private jet by hired operatives who got him through customs – because, fantastic though it sounds, the crate was too big to x-ray.

“I have no regrets regarding my escape,” he tells Shukan Post. “The treatment I received at the hands of prosecutors was cruel, inhuman and unfair. I knew I was liable to be rearrested at any time. There was no alternative but to get out of the reach of Japan’s corrupt justice system.”

And if you were still in charge at Nissan? the magazine asks.

What would he do? He mentions a name that resonates way beyond its three syllables: “My friend Elon Musk.”

Musk’s astonishing career is well known – what entrepreneur’s better? Donald Trump’s, maybe. Musk is the world’s richest man, Trump the most powerful; Trump president of the United States, Musk his cost-cutter- and firer-in-chief. Whether Ghosn as Nissan’s Musk would be good for the company in the long run or not, this much at least is certain: there must be many Nissan employees breathing a sigh of relief that he is where he is and not where he might be otherwise.

Courtesy Japan Today