Customer Reviews

Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carlos Ghosn is the pragmatic global citizen who rose through the ranks at Michelin and Renault before taking on the enormous challenge of turning around Nissan Motors. The performance he engineered with his teams has been extraordinary, and is certainly a story worth telling. Unfortunately, this book doesn't do the job. Instead, read "Turnaround : How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan" by David Magee.

I purchased "Shift" because it was billed as having "insight into the Japanese way of doing business." Unfortunately, it fell short of that, and most anything else. This slim (200p.) whisp of work reads like a magazine article whipped up after one or two interviews; not the product of the person who catalyzed the turnaround.

Pros: Ghosn starts the book by introducing us to his beginnings, his family, and business experiences. His global worldview and background certainly served him well when he moved to Japan to take on this enormous challenge. His Lebanese, Brazilian, French, Brazilian, American, and French experiences certainly set him up to assimilate/communicate well in Japan.

Cons: Where's the beef? The book includes no relating about what it took to make things happen, how he communicated and transformed the culture of this moribund giant.

Overall, reads more like a mag article by a third party than a business memoir.

Great story, real life story. Turning vision to reality, that's what he did. Carlos Ghosn is a true pragmatist, among other things. In this book he provides many specific details about his plan for Nissan's revival. Nothing came by chance. He had checked everything down to the slightest detail prior to devising the plan, which in turn he then had to "sell" to everybody, i.e. he had to convince so many parties involved - Nissan's workforce, Japanese society, world's media, etc. Not exactly the easiest of jobs, but he did it. Once they believed in his vision and actually got down to DOING what they had to, they succeeded. Simple as that.

Great book, great leadership lesson. Highly recommended.

Begins by tracing Ghosn's ancestry, early upbringing, and first assignments (Michelin - Brazil, U.S.; Renault, in France). The best part of the book, however, covers his revival of Nissan.

Renault felt threatened by the Daimler-Chrysler merger, and began looking at Nissan (along with G.M.). G.M., however, backed out, and the management challenge went to Ghosn. Nissan had lost Japanese market share for 27 years in a row, and was operating at 50% capacity, with far too many suppliers, constant goal changes, poor accounting data regarding product line profitability (later found only 4 of 43 models were making a profit), and goals generally lacked quantitative specificity on amount (eg. "Build a quality product"), timing, or priority.

He began with nine three-month cross-functional recommendation teams in key areas - eg. procurement, etc. The procurement team found Nissan paying 20-25% more for parts than Renault. Ghosn, based on prior experience, suggested achieving 1/3 of the improvement through engineering changes. The rest was attained through reducing the number of suppliers to a targeted level. Other goals included reducing general/administrative costs 20%, reducing dealership overlap by cutting the number 10%, cutting debt 50% by selling Nissan's holdings in its suppliers and reapplying the funds to debt reduction and new investment, and a specific date for returning to a stated level of profitability.

Ghosn also concluded that Nissan had a weak brand image - forcing it to sell products at lower prices than otherwise; he brought in a new chief designer from Isuzu to kick-start improvement.

Ghosn's focus throughout was on results, not culture change. (The old culture was one of excuses - problems were always someone else's fault.) Finally, staff previously learned their performance rewards at the end of the year. Ghosn changed that so that specific rewards were set at the beginning of the year.

Ghosn's report of actions taken at Nissan were interesting and valuable. I only wish he had gone into greater detail.

This book is part bio and part Ghosn' own business methodology for turning around companies. It's applicable to the reader whether you are a CIO or if you are just the manager or leader of a small team. The basic methods of analyzing and measuring the problems are one and the same whatever the scale or issue. That's one reason why this is a worthwhile read.

Ghosn' multi-cultural background is interesting and fairly unique in the international business world - but that was only one factor contributing to his success at Michelin and Renault. It provided him a unique and invaluable outsider's perspective in companies that were (at least initially) very much closed to any other way of thinking. Those two companies were his training ground for the turnaround at Nissan he led.

It's well-written and an easy read. But it's not a long book and some of the difficulties he went thru surely weren't as easy as everything else he portrays.

Unfortunately, it's also not the story of the products that made Nissan into what it is today. You won't find the words "Infiniti" or "350Z" in the index, much less discussions of the "FM" platform that is a critical element of some of their most successful and desirable products. If you're interested in those topics you'll need to look elsewhere. Nonetheless, those things were not possible without Ghosn taking the business apart and putting it back together. And that's what makes this a worthwhile read.

This book was published in France in 2003 and I'm just reading it now in mid-2008. About 2-3 years ago we saw a drought of new products for Nissan and Infiniti... that fact and the resulting sales slump doesn't sync with what we saw in this book. The drought is over now... the brilliant success of Infiniti is reassured with new models, while the GT-R and the upcoming new Z will add needed luster to the Nissan brand. But I am still left wondering what happened... and we won't find that either in this book. Clearly an update is needed, but by an outside third-party.

-Jeff

DrivingEnthusiast.net

Quite an enjoyable read and certainly much better than Turnaround (by Magee) which worships Ghosn ad nauseam and at the expense of almost everyone else around him. Unfortunately neither book talks about what improvements were already taking place before Ghosn started at Nissan. Given how quickly the turnaround happened, it's hard to believe that some of the foundation wasn't being laid in the months and years prior to his arrival.

This autobiography by stellar auto executive Carlos Ghosn is part family history, part memoir and, it must be acknowledged, part corporate public relations exercise. Ghosn covers his international childhood, student days and working experience at Michelin and Renault, but the meat of the content concerns his remarkable achievements at Nissan. Ghosn's account of his work is clear and interesting, if somewhat superficial. He rarely offers original or striking insights. He tells readers what he did and sometimes why, but neither the "what" nor the "why" seem to break new ground. Ghosn may be a man of action unaccustomed to reflection, or he may be a private man who keeps his deeper conclusions to himself. We recommend his book to automotive industry readers, because it is a memoir of an industry leader. Others might enjoy the occasional memorable flash of insight - such as Ghosn's observations on Japan's traditional and somewhat illusory "consensus" approach to management, or his comment that Japanese business leaders do not know how to take the actions that circumstances demand. Of course, anybody else's actions might look a little tentative in the face of Ghosn's decisive career path.

A must read for all CEOs. As the world gets smaller and smaller through globalization, internet and superfast communications, every manufacturer from your local shop to General Motors needs to serve the 6 billion customers. Carlos Ghosn did it with passion, integrity and style. The fact that he can change the mindset of the Japanese management is truly remarkable. He is a hero in Nissan, Japan and a true role model for all CEOs. The book will be better if he can include more about the future US expansion plan. Rick Wagoner, watch out, he is after your job!

The Nissan story certainly should be compelling and Ghosn himself is a rockstar business celebrity. How come the book was so dull and after reading it I still didn't know what Ghosn had actually done to turn around Nissan?

Two things recommend this book: Ghosn's recollections of starting out at Michelin...his portrait of that privately owned corporation was much more interesting than his Nissan story; and as a companion to the Reckoning, David Halberstam's history of Detroit that focused on Ford's eclipse by none other than Nissan. To find out that Nissan was already rotting from within by the time Halberstam was finishing his great book, makes this poor one at least an interesting appendix.

Carlos Ghosn is a very talented and mutlicultured individual leading the way in the globalized economy. This is an important book for those having an interest in business and insight to the changing dynamic of the automobile industry. I read this book prior to the General Motors rejection of the global corporate alliance with NISSAN as advocated by Ghosn. The book gave me a much greater appreciation of the international alliance being sought among flagging automakers to enhance productivity, efficiency, and survival. I recommend the book for purchase for especially any reader interested in corporate globalization culture.

This book was advertised as used, but came to me before the deadline in perfect condition.