Time Machine: Ghosn With The Wind

This story originally ran in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2018.

TOKYO — The Carlos Ghosn story is the Japanese auto industry version of Bobby Valentine’s tale at Lotte. Highly rated, and highly paid, foreigner comes in, takes over and revives ailing Japanese organization, then falls victim to internecine jealousy over his compensation and expanding power.

In Valentine’s case, he came to Japan in 2004 with a $4 million salary, higher than any other manager in Japanese baseball by far, but also with the reputation in MLB as a bold, brash manager with a track record of winning wherever he managed, be it with the Texas Rangers or the New York Mets. He revamped the team’s conservative, traditional way of doing things into a looser, more modern approach, and led the lowly Marines to a Japan Championship, their first in decades and revised the way the organization did business — offering all sorts of inducements to fans, such as free cha-cha lessons (by Valentine himself), to increase attendance, and selling stadium naming rights, among other things. He was named executive of the year in one business poll, the ‘ideal boss’ in another.