What Made Carlos Ghosn Successful at Nissan?
According to the assigned article, Carlos Ghosn, in addition to having a respectful approach towards the French-Japanese business culture clash, retained an attitude of blame acceptance in the event of his plan’s failure. However, while a person’s character is an essential factor, which affects the business that they conduct or manage, their professional integrity remains an even more crucial aspect of either a company’s growth or its deterioration.
Hence, instituting numerous cross-functional teams and sub-teams, creating a system of interconnectivity between managers’ local and regional functionality, and adhering to a merit-based reward system allowed Ghosn to prevent Nissan’s bankruptcy through stimulating productivity.
Most importantly, improving the company’s supply chain and disregarding the damaging aspects of Japanese inter-corporate culture, such as keiretsu, permitted freeing up capital that was otherwise idle and, therefore, unprofitable. Thus, the revised flow of goods and services through the company to the consumer stimulated by a broader, more careful approach to management made possible achieving the Nissan Revival Plan even earlier than expected.
What Is Necessary for That Success to Continue?
Modernization and progress stem from necessity and adversity supported by appropriate management from qualified specialists, who are flexible as well as experienced. However, while a crucial factor in Nissan’s revival, urgency may be considered a situational occurrence, which may be unusable to sustain continuous growth, but could allow stimulating it through setting an innovative precedent.
Ghosn was able to maintain the balance between situational adaptability and business experience, utilizing necessary aspects from each and disregarding those inapplicable to the atmosphere in Nissan, requiring comparable mindfulness levels from his successor. The demonstrative effectivity of the tactics used by Ghosn could motivate their continuous implementation while remaining adherent to Japanese cultural norms of productivity.
Such methods may involve further building upon the achieved focus of management on the supply chain successfully initiated by involving managers at different levels of production. Thus, building upon the already attained success, Ghosn’s successor may need to integrate new strategies in the same culture mindful way, producing stellar results on the joint between tradition and innovation.