Quotes from-about Carlos Ghosn relevant to "Positive Deviance" and change

Because I am from Michigan, I feel obligated to follow the car industry pretty closely, even though I write negatively about automobile-centric land use and development planning.

The current issue of Forbes has an article, "The Impatient Mr. Ghosn," about Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan and Renault. Ghosn is renowned for the turnaround of Nissan, a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Here are some quotes from the article that I think are relevant to what I wrote earlier today about the necessity for change in the DC Public School System:

1. [Re: report after report, study after study] "I've had 250 presentations on sales and marketing in the last three years. What is done? Why is it never done?" he asays. He wonders why it took a special task force to arrive at such a commonsense solution. "I'm so sad our own management is not able to come up with such ideas. I'm so sad."

2. [Re: state of the schools] (This is from the sidebar "Could He Make It a Triple Play?.")
Q: Is that what's wrong with Detroit automakers--they let problems fester?
A: Any company that finds itself in this situation where it's going through heavy restructuring has obviously missed a lot of signals before that something was wrong and needed to be fixed. … My perfect illustration was Nissan. … The more you wait for a problem to be solved, the more casualties you are going to have to accept, and the more risk at the outcome.

Q: It sounds like you don't have too much sympathy for U.S. automakers?
A: Well, it's not a question of sympathy. I have a lot of sympathy, and we have a very good relationship. ... I think it's a question, really, of reality. That in a certain way you may have fabricated the conditions that you are complaining about today.

Q: Do you think Detroit is permanently broken?
A: I don't think so. There is nothing which cannot be fixed.

3. [Re: school closures] We were pushing people very hard," designing more than ten new models per year, plus five or six concept cars, Nakamura recalls. Ghosn did his part by never dallying on a final design decision. "Every meeting, a decision was made," says Nakamura. "There's nothing worse than delaying a decision. It's not motivating."

4. [Re: competition] "These days everybody is worried about the future. It's not good enough to say we're better than we were before. If you improve by 3% but competitors are improving by 5%, you're actually becoming less competitive."

5. [Re: breakthrough ideas] Yet Ghosn always leaves time for debate. "What I hate," he says firmly, "are meetings when people hide their opinions. If you don't see different aspects of a decision and different options, you can't make a good decision." He uses cross-pollinated committees to breed conflict, ensuring they are led by promising mavericks who, oddly, lack expertise in the areas they oversee--that way they can challenge and question even the most basic accepted procedures. This rankles the veterans and puts team leaders at risk. "That's why they report to the CEO. That's how they survive," Ghosn says.

The inevitable clashes let managers see possibilities they hadn't imagined before, says Renault's controller, Jean-Baptiste Duzan. "It's just like a spring--you have to push to release the energy. At Renault we had no sense of time. The spring was not tense at all."

Index Keywords: education