Nissan
NISSAN CASE
In the following, we are going to determine and discuss the 8 steps of Kotter in the Renault-Nissan article.
The first step on the Kotter “scale” is “Establishing a sense of urgency”. From the beginning, Carlos Ghosn had a very clear communication strategy. He worked on creating a sense of urgency by sharing to the world how bad Nissan’s situation was. On the 18th of October 1999, Ghosn got straight to the point, by affirming to the auditors that Nissan was in a bad shape and was losing market share continuously since 1991. Carlos Ghosn then tried to emphasize on Nissan’s shape by sharing numbers and comparing Nissan’s losses to the total annual sales of Volvo. “Nissan is in bad shape”, “Nissan has been losing global market share continuously since 1991… Our production has dropped by more than 600000 cars in that period… more than the total annual car sales of the Volvo brand.”
Ghosn afterwards summarized Nissan’s performance problem in five points: Lack of clear profit orientation, insufficient focus on customers and too much focus on chasing competitors, lack of cross-functional, cross border, intrahierarchical work in the company, lack of a sense of urgency and no shared vision or common long-term plan.
The second step is about “forming a guiding coalition”. In his strategy of turning Nissan into a profitable company once again, and in line with his communication strategy as well, Ghosn created nine cross-functional teams to generate ideas and recommendation for change in critical areas like purchasing, engineering and R&D. “Each team had two board level sponsors to give the cross-functional team authority within the organization to prevent one functional perspective from dominating.” “The teams worked on three simple guidelines, one goal, to develop the business and reduce cost, one deadline, three month for final efficient decision making, one rule: no taboos and constraints.”
The third step, “creating a vision”, became clear when Ghosn
In the following, we are going to determine and discuss the 8 steps of Kotter in the Renault-Nissan article.
The first step on the Kotter “scale” is “Establishing a sense of urgency”. From the beginning, Carlos Ghosn had a very clear communication strategy. He worked on creating a sense of urgency by sharing to the world how bad Nissan’s situation was. On the 18th of October 1999, Ghosn got straight to the point, by affirming to the auditors that Nissan was in a bad shape and was losing market share continuously since 1991. Carlos Ghosn then tried to emphasize on Nissan’s shape by sharing numbers and comparing Nissan’s losses to the total annual sales of Volvo. “Nissan is in bad shape”, “Nissan has been losing global market share continuously since 1991… Our production has dropped by more than 600000 cars in that period… more than the total annual car sales of the Volvo brand.”
Ghosn afterwards summarized Nissan’s performance problem in five points: Lack of clear profit orientation, insufficient focus on customers and too much focus on chasing competitors, lack of cross-functional, cross border, intrahierarchical work in the company, lack of a sense of urgency and no shared vision or common long-term plan.
The second step is about “forming a guiding coalition”. In his strategy of turning Nissan into a profitable company once again, and in line with his communication strategy as well, Ghosn created nine cross-functional teams to generate ideas and recommendation for change in critical areas like purchasing, engineering and R&D. “Each team had two board level sponsors to give the cross-functional team authority within the organization to prevent one functional perspective from dominating.” “The teams worked on three simple guidelines, one goal, to develop the business and reduce cost, one deadline, three month for final efficient decision making, one rule: no taboos and constraints.”
The third step, “creating a vision”, became clear when Ghosn