Carlos Ghosn Was a Superhero in Japan Before His Fall

For a country renowned for its cultural insularity, Japan’s business world has been remarkably open to foreign influences. In the early postwar years, the fabled management consultant W. Edwards Deming became a demigod there, introducing quality-control principles that would catapult the nation to the forefront of global manufacturing by the 1970s. Later, outsiders from the West such as Howard Stringer at Sony Corp. and Christophe Weber, the current chief executive officer of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., would rise to the highest echelons of corporate Japan.

Yet it’s safe to say the country had never quite seen the likes of Carlos Ghosn. The brash Renault SA executive showed up in 1999 as the French carmaker combined with Nissan Motor, a company with massive debt, heavy losses, and a badly damaged brand. Renault was then a middling European automaker with a far-from-inspiring future. Ghosn had a reputation as a savage cost-cutter and first-class intellect, but he was an unknown figure in Japan. Even he would later say that he gave this salvage job only a 50-50 chance of succeeding.