Carlos Ghosn

By examining the process of change, this requires to provide an interest toward key players, particularly to the leaders involved. A key success factor lies in the personalities that guide the alliance and lead actions with the support of human resources.

In this light, Carlos Ghosn has played a vital role. Elected three times as the best manager of the year in Japan, the CEO of Nissan has impressed or even seduced the Japanese.

Although he is a stranger, he has become a national hero. He can be considered as a mythical hero of the company.

As a manager, he seems to have a large vision, managerial skills, communication and interpersonal, and even intercultural. These skills are essential to manage the process of an international alliance, as Irrmann said. Carlos Ghosn is certainly one of the few truly multicultural managers and sees himself as a "citizen of the world."

Carlos Ghosn, with strong international experience, demonstrated a large "communicational ability" by watching and listening.

He goes on the field, gathers information, exchanges ideas with staff (from the workshop to top management) and seeks to learn from the new environment while maintaining his cultural identity.

His method is indeed very holistic and very close to systemic approach that considers the environment as a system. Before taking managerial decisions, Carlos Ghosn takes time and try to know the organizational context, its system, its history, its elements and actors, their relationships and interactions that cause the dynamics and system stability or instability.

The systemic approach considers the overall logic emerging from relationships between phenomena or individuals, rather than from the specific characteristics of each individual element.

To do this, Carlos Ghosn tries to have no prejudice, to work fast and earn the trust and respect with solid results. To explain the state of Nissan, he puts forward five main reasons: lack of a culture of profit, lack of customer orientation, lack of communication and cross between functions, countries and hierarchies, lack of sense of urgency and lack of shared vision or shared long-term plan.

From the beginning of the alliance, Carlos Ghosn set up cross-functional teams - as he had already practiced in South America at Michelin - which allow French and Japanese to mix and merge their management styles, trying to remove only the best of each system rather than arriving at that one dominates the other.