Long revered in Japan for saving Nissan from bankruptcy in 1999 and helping Renault achieve the best results in its history, Ghosn explains being transformed overnight into a pariah, torn from the world and his family as the victim of a smear campaign. Ghosn also recounts how he built the Franco-Japanese Alliance into a global motor giant, expanding operations in markets from the United States, China and Russia to Brazil, Morocco and Thailand, becoming the world’s top automaker by volume in 2017. But his arrest in late 2018 plunges the Alliance into crisis as company share prices collapse at the same time as the global auto industry faces an unprecedented technological revolution. Broken Alliances involves the highest levels of political power in Japan and France, describing a Japanese judicial system that resembles the Moscow show trials under Stalin in the 1930s and a dysfunctional French system constrained by a legacy of state intervention and traditional hostility towards globalization — a stance shared by ordinary people and the country’s ruling elite. The book also addresses the reasons behind Nissan’s internal coup and questions about Ghosn’s remuneration, his management methods and his vision for the future of electric and self-driving vehicles.
Carlos Ghosn is the former chairman and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, the collaborative Franco-Japanese partnership between Groupe Renault, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. He also served as chairman and chief executive at Renault (2005-19) and chairman at Nissan and Mitsubishi (until 2018). After improving the operations of French tire maker Michelin in Brazil, Ghosn moved to Greenville, South Carolina where he oversaw the merger between Michelin North America and Uniroyal-Goodrich. He is best known for orchestrating the remarkable turnaround of Nissan from near bankruptcy in 1999. Ghosn later became the auto industry’s longest-serving chief executive and the first to run two Fortune Global 500 companies at the same time. Born in Brazil, he was educated in Lebanon and France, graduating with engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique (1974) and the Paris School of Mines (1978). He now lives in Lebanon. Philippe Riès is a journalist who spent almost three decades at Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world’s oldest news agency. He served as AFPs chief economics editor in Paris for six years before leaving in 2008 to become a founding member of Mediapart, the worlds first online journal available exclusively by subscription. Riès worked extensively with AFP in Japan and Hong Kong, covering the rise of Japan’s “bubble economy” in the 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. He returned to Tokyo as AFP bureau chief in 1998, moving to the same position in Brussels in 2003. A graduate of Sciences Po in Paris, he has authored four books including Shift: Inside Nissans Historic Revival with Carlos Ghosn (originally published in French as Citoyen du Monde) and Asian Storm (published as Cette crise qui vient d’Asie). He now lives in Portugal, tending 450 olive trees and producing his own olive oil. Peter Starr is a writer who has been based in the Mekong Delta in Cambodia since 2000. He has lived in Asia since 1986, working for 15 years as an editor, correspondent and consultant for AFP, mostly in Japan and Hong Kong. Before that, he covered banking for the Australian Financial Review. Over the past two decades, Starr has authored three corporate histories of Citigroup and edited the memoirs of Heng Samrin, the former president of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea who is now Cambodia’s speaker of parliament. He also translated the book by Philippe Riès on the Asian financial crisis and has been involved in training journalists from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam for the New York-based Independent Journalism Foundation.
