Collision Course by Hans Greimel

Author:Hans Greimel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

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The Renault side, caught completely flatfooted, needed time to digest the arrest of its longtime leader. Bolloré and his inner circle were appalled by Nissan’s aggressive, ruthlessly choreographed public relations blitz against Ghosn, from the very night of his arrest. Many at Renault feared Nissan, long resentful of the French company’s control, was seizing the situation to sabotage the Alliance and finally make a break for independence.

“They had a massive propaganda plan. I could say PR plan, but it’s beyond PR. It’s propaganda,” one Bolloré adviser said of Nissan. “We had not one idea what was going to happen. I have never seen that before when you have a compliance issue in a company, especially in the top management. Usually, you issue the shortest press release you can and try to preserve the reputation of the companies. All the choices of Nissan show they had a plan to hit not only Renault but also the Alliance.”

An initial flash point was how to replace Ghosn as chairman at Nissan. Renault reserved the right to appoint top Nissan executives under the terms of the Alliance agreement. Now, however, Nissan leveraged the power vacuum to push back. Nissan executives said they wanted a bigger say in picking their next chairman. They also wanted to abolish the position of overarching Alliance chairman, a role Ghosn carved out for himself as the final arbiter at all three companies. Finally, Nissan wanted to wind down Renault-Nissan BV, the Netherlands-based joint venture that was gradually morphing into a prototype holding company of the kind Ghosn once imagined as the way to make the Alliance “irreversible.” To Nissan, this was a Trojan horse for Renault control—it had final say on matters of Nissan’s business and product plans, the company’s lifeblood.

No doubt, Nissan was pressing new demands. The question was, Why now? Nissan executives argued that the rampant misconduct, at the hands of Renault-installed Ghosn, necessitated a rethink of business-as-usual. Citing Ghosn’s alleged misdeeds as justification, they saw a chance to retune the Alliance to their liking. But seen from a more skeptical Renault perspective, and one held by many outside observers, Nissan’s power play smelled more like the calculated final act of a cold-blooded coup that began with a fabricated takedown of Ghosn.

Was reworking or even disbanding the Alliance the real endgame?

Maybe. To hard-core traditionalists inside Nissan, going solo would have been perfectly fine.

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