The chief executive of Renault and Nissan, a Brazilian-born, Lebanese graduate of the French Grand Ecole, Carlos Ghosn is a truly international executive who shot to worldwide recognition after his speedy turnaround of Nissan.

SIMON HOBBS: How did you feel back in March 1999, when Louis Schweitzer, the CEO of Renault, said: “I can do the deal with Nissan, but I have only one man who can go in and sort it out and turn it around, and it’s you.”

CARLOS GHOSN: With my international experience and interest in incorporating into Nissan, it was not a total surprise. The only question I had was how I was going to talk about this with my wife!

SH: Immediately, without even having a post within Nissan, you began travelling around the world, talking to the trade unions, talking to the suppliers – why?

CG: The most important thing when you are starting with a new company, particularly when it is in trouble, is that you must establish a diagnosis. You can do this only by going to see for yourself the people at all levels of the company, so your picture of what is going on is as real and as precise as possible.

SH: You hand-picked a group of 30 in Paris from Renault to send to Nissan Japan. What did you tell them in those two days that you had to prepare them before they left?

CG: I told them that they were picked because they are open-minded experts and that we didn’t want them to be teachers; we wanted them to be coaches to facilitate the change, not make the change.

SH: Your leadership style is clearly not just about the facts; it’s about the exchange of ideas and about what you call building an “active consensus” when people disagree.

CG: Yes, Nissan Japan in 1999 had an acute sense of “passive consensus”, which means that if you are in a group of 10 people and one person disagrees, then no decision is made. Consensus is very important because when you make a decision you need to move to action and if you want to go to action effectively, you need everybody on board. An “active consensus” means that either the one person convinces the nine others or vice versa.

SH: In one week you made all the decisions necessary for the Nissan revival plan, which meant five factories closing in Japan and 21,000 jobs gone. Why wasn’t there much resistance?

CG: Usually, you have resistance when somebody has a different opinion than you. In our case there was no alternative: three recovery plans had been tried, and all failed. I was the first one to say: “I want you to challenge me. If you think you have a better idea to get the company fixed, I’m ready to listen.”

SH: You believe that the Renault-Nissan alliance, founded on the idea of respect and not misusing power, is your big contribution to corporate culture.

CG: The alliance is unique. They have a cross-shareholding agreement – Renault owns 44% of Nissan and Nissan owns 15% of Renault. From the beginning we respected different identities, different corporate autonomies.

SH: What does globalisation mean for the future of multinationals?

CG: It’s very simple. You cannot have or strengthen globalisation unless you respect identities. If people feel their own identity is threatened by globalisation, they are going to resist it.

SH: Being such a motivator, do you push people too far sometimes? I’m thinking particularly of the three suicides in the Paris technical operation.

CG: Well, I don’t think that you can relate these cases to the fact that you are in a culture where you are stretching the company and trying to achieve your potential. I think every time you have a suicide in a company you have to sit down and say: “Why did it happen, and what can we change to avoid or limit the risk of this happening again?”

SH: How did you feel seven years ago at Nissan when you started missing targets?

CG: Anyone in a position of leadership in a company will eventually be in a position where the company will begin to miss its targets, but every time you start to miss something, you must get the lesson out of it. It’s very important that you let people know that failure is not something that is forbidden. If people think that if they fail, they will get in trouble, they will never take a risk.

SH: Do you ever fear that you’ll just lose the knack?

CG: I’m not afraid of that. At any time you can be challenged, lose the knack; as long as you have the motivation, the eagerness to gain it again, you can get back in the game. The essence of a CEO job is about rebounding, reboosting, coming up with an alternative.

SH: What do you most regret so far?

CG: I would redo practically everything I’ve done in a different way! But if I had to change one thing, there are some people that I trusted at certain occasions that had I known what I know now, I would have picked other people for these jobs.

SH: What are you most proud of?

CG: That I’ve given Nissan people their confidence back. EB