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.
