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Within a few hours of the “Ghosn arrested†headlines flashing around the world, it was clear that books would be written about this extraordinary, yet perhaps inexorable, turn of events. By the time the fallen superstar chief executive and charismatic exemplar of “Davos Man†was smuggled out of Japan in a musical equipment box just over a year later, the whole story seemed fit for a Netflix dramatisation.
Collision Course, written by two journalists with long experience of both Japan and the auto industry, is among the first attempts to sensibly chronicle and contextualise this remarkable episode. The briskly paced result is quick to set the scene and also to reassure us that while there will be no shortage of colour and insight on Ghosn himself, one of the outcomes of the drama has been to reveal the inner workings of “Big Autoâ€.
More specifically, it shows the dysfunction of the Renault-Nissan alliance that might have become the biggest automotive group in the world. Born in 1999 through the French carmaker’s rescue of the Japanese giant, it was held together by Ghosn for two decades before his spectacular downfall.
Alongside serious analysis, Hans Greimel and William Sposato never lose sight of how fundamentally jarring it was that a company and country that celebrated Ghosn as one of its greatest-ever imports can have been so fiercely instrumental in laying him low. It is a dissonance that we were reminded of this week as Ghosn gave interviews to international media seeking once again to defend his reputation.
The world’s media have been waiting for explanations ever since November 19 2018 when reporters were summoned to a 10pm press conference at Nissan’s Yokohama headquarters. Ghosn, still at that point chairman of Nissan and head of the tormented global alliance of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi, had abruptly been forced from a company jet to a detention centre, having earlier been arrested upon arrival at Haneda airport on unspecified allegations.
Ghosn was now in the hands of a justice system notorious for its sky-high conviction rate and reliance on confessions extracted from suspects held under the same conditions as Ghosn. That first press conference, conducted by Nissan’s CEO, made it plain that Ghosn’s downfall had been precipitated through collaboration between Nissan executives and prosecutors.
A great deal has followed since then, including Ghosn’s astonishing escape, the extradition from the US of those who aided him and the now unanswerable questions about what might have happened in Japan’s “trial of the centuryâ€. New revelations, supposedly promising clarification, have often made the story more opaque.
Any good Ghosn book was also going to encounter the issue of how much should be viewed as entirely sui generis, and how much might be seen as wider parables about Japan and its business culture. The authors have opted not to push such comparisons too far, though readers are left to draw their own conclusions.
The rush to publication means that there are a few gaps in the Greimel and Sposato account. The biggest is that we will not know until October the outcome of the trial of Greg Kelly, the former Nissan executive arrested on the same day as Ghosn and fighting one of the four charges on which his boss would have stood trial. The authors acknowledge the proxy role this trial plays in the eventual perception of Ghosn’s guilt or innocence, tacitly admitting that future authors may have more to work with.
Greimel, who had covered Nissan before Ghosn’s arrest, reported on the events that followed it in meticulous detail for Automotive News. Collision Course draws on his past interviews with Ghosn, and on one extensive discussion for the book itself. And while the book does not produce great flourishes of new information, its strongest appeal lies in the solidity of exposition, the access to high-quality sources and the clarity of the thesis that the alliance was, and remains, a generator of extraordinary frictions.
This has been achieved by framing each strand of the story as a type of collision — between Ghosn and Japan; Nissan and Renault; France and Japan; innovation and inertia; government and business, and so on. The framework allows them to move confidently to and fro between the events that followed the arrest and the factors that lay ahead of it. The result is a much needed plausible cause-and-effect account that helps explain a complex, often bewildering story.
Key to this device is a series of short chapters interspersing the central narrative with sharply drawn essays on relevant aspects of modern Japan. Some feel unnecessarily broken-out from the main narrative, but the ones on the justice system, on corporate scandals and on Japan’s history of deal-making with foreign companies serve as important correctives to some of the misperceptions unleashed by the Ghosn saga.
If Collision Course can be accused of short-changing readers, it is because of its reluctance to dip into a line of speculation created by its own structure. Were there ever clear moments where any of the key players — Ghosn, Nissan, Renault, the prosecutors or the plotters — could have steered everything off the collision course? We reach its final page with a beautifully clear picture of why disaster occurred, but very little sense of how it might not have done so.
Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire by Hans Greimel and William Sposato, Harvard Business Review Press £22, 256 pages
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia business editor
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