Sudden spring

Nissan does not get too many mentions in India. A pity. And an odd one at that. As a revival story, it is gripping, even to those who don't know Carlos Ghosn (say "Goan"), the Japanese car company's revival man, from Macadam.

In Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival, he lets you in on his own version of the effort, with co-author Philippe Ries doing a drum roll for some heady moments of drama. The odd part? In a business largely lost to the cause of efficiency in bashing metal into boxes that roll, Ghosn dared to play a Mogul.

Don't get me wrong.

The man didn't go throwing any weight around. He couldn't. Europe's Renault, newly privatised by the French government, had sent him on a commando operation to rescue Nissan armed with just over a third of its equity.

A stake Renault bought for $5 billion in the Spring of 1999, and raised later to 44.4 per cent""still below "control", but affirming the global alliance all the same. If he was there at Keidanren Kaikan, that "holy" chamber of Japanese industry, it was not because of constitutional clout, or power ratios of any sort, but the big shift he had geared his head for.

And his power of persuasion.

The scene was grim. With 1999-2000's loss of $6 billion, "le cost cutter" Ghosn should have done the media proud and cut costs, right? Heck, no. This was a company that had got too used to kidding itself. To him, the more dizzying alarm was the waffle he heard from people when asked what Nissan actually signified. Without universal purpose, what hope for a strategy?

Strategy...?

Wait-a-minute: since when did business books start giving the game away? Strictly speaking, Ghosn doesn't. But for all his taut language, there's subtlety enough to disclose just that much and no more. This, despite being a translation""fallible in the best of hands""from French.

It was English, though, that Ghosn and everyone else working at Nissan spoke""as an effective communication tool. With family, it was either Portuguese or Arabic.

That's him. Global Ghosn. Post-identity man. Born in Brazil to parents of Lebanese origin. Educated in France. And a tyreman for 18 years on a roll, a time spent on stuff as diverse as market responses, latex plantations and zooming in on anomalies.

"And it's true," he writes, citing a Michelin insight, "the piece that doesn't fit is the source of innovation."

By mid-October 1999, it was obvious that Ghosn had no intention of fitting in. It was the Tokyo Motor Show. Instead of concept cars adorned with leggy lasses, Ghosn sprang forth a frank speech on Nissan's misery""with a pledge to turn profitable, take the operating margin past 4.4 per cent of sales, and halve the debt burden. By 2002-03. If not, he'd quit.

Yes, he did shut factories. There would be losers, he declared to another ripple of jitters, and winners. Tackling taboo after taboo, he snapped off its "keiretsu" web, threw its money to the discipline of financial markets, picked entrepreneurs as dealers, formed cross-functional teams, got people talking to one another for an "active consensus", and gave designers the freedom to imagine the car as a "love affair".

All this, without the French or Japanese at each other's throats.

The harmony formula? Mutual respect for identities, writes Ghosn san, keen to portray Nissan's "union of differences" as a competitive edge, and a special one at that, created by a unique form of "cross-fertilization".

Overall, the critical success factor was indeed the significance of "Nissan".

Before that, though, here's a confession: I have always allotted the brand more mindspace than is professionally justifiable. Datsun, before it became Nissan, was my first and only Matchbox car. The brand also gave me my first and only thunderstrike of economics.

It was a sticker shock, on a visit to Bahrain shortly after the 1979 Oil Shock. The price of a snazzy 1.6-litre Nissan... one-fourth that of a clunky old Premier in Delhi! It gave me a feverish fascination for competition and markets, and for theories and idealisations of varied human conception.

Anyhow, while "Nissan" sure sounds like Japanese for "No, brother", or something to that effect, it turns out to be the literal contraction of "Nihon Sangyo"""Japanese Industry. That's what everyone at Nissan had to absorb for Ghosn to engineer a revival.

They did. The get-real school of "myth busting" in mutually assured deliberation with the golden rule of "consumer empathy". It rocked.

Nissan has been wowing graph watchers ever since. And if a sudden new Spring is to be heralded, it could well be the wondrous warble of a Nissan Bluebird on a victory lap (hear "tru-aly, tru-aly"?).

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SHIFT
INSIDE NISSAN'S HISTORIC REVIVAL

Carlos Ghosn & Philippe Ries
Doubleday
Pages: xxiv+232; Price: $25.95

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