Carlos Ghosn - Origins and Personal Life

Origins and Personal Life

Ghosn's grandfather Bichala Ghosn emigrated from rural Lebanon to Brazil at the age of 13, eventually settling in remote Guaporé, Rondonia, near the border between Brazil and Bolivia. Bichala Ghosn entered the rubber industry and eventually headed a company that bought and sold agricultural products. His son Jorge Ghosn settled in the regional capital of Porto Velho and married a Nigerian-born woman whose family also came from Lebanon.

Carlos Ghosn was born on 9 March 1954. When he was about one year old, he became sick after drinking unsanitary water, and the family moved to Rio de Janeiro. In 1960, when Ghosn was six years old, he moved with his three siblings and mother to Beirut, Lebanon. He completed his secondary school studies in Lebanon, at the Jesuit school Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour. Then he completed his classes préparatoires at Lycée Stanislas in Paris. He graduated with engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique in 1978 (X1974) with the final year's specialisation at the École des Mines de Paris.

After graduation, Ghosn spent 18 years at Michelin & Cie., Europe's largest tiremaker. He worked in several plants in France and in 1985, when Ghosn was 30 years old, he was appointed chief operating officer of Michelin’s $300 million South American operations. He returned to Rio de Janeiro, reporting directly to François Michelin, who tasked Ghosn with turning around the operation, which was unprofitable and struggling under Brazil's hyperinflation. Ghosn formed cross-functional management teams to determine best practices among the French, Brazilian and other nationalities working in the South American division. The experience in multicultural Brazil formed the basis of his cross-cultural management style and emphasis on diversity as a core business asset. ("You learn from diversity... but you're comforted by commonality," Ghosn said.) The division returned to profitability in two years. After turning around Michelin's South American operations, Ghosn took his family to Greenville, South Carolina, where he became CEO of Michelin’s North American operations.

Ghosn has attracted controversy for his demanding and sometimes confrontational style. He has also drawn criticism for investing heavily in developing economies, including Brazil, Russia, Korea, India and in particular China, where Nissan is now the No. 1 Japanese carmaker. His strategy for penetrating emerging markets includes selling cars with sticker prices under $3,000 and commercializing affordable zero-emission vehicles: "If you're going to let developing countries have as many cars as they want -- and they're going to have as many cars as they want one way or another -- there is no absolutely alternative but to go for zero emissions. And the only zero-emissions vehicle available today is electric.... So we decided to go for it," he told the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Ghosn, whom Forbes magazine called "the hardest-working man in the brutally competitive global car business," splits his time between Paris and Tokyo and logs roughly 150,000 miles in airplanes per year. Japanese media also call him “Seven-Eleven” (“work very hard from early in the morning till late at night”). Ghosn holds both Brazilian and French citizenships. Ghosn is multilingual and speaks at least four languages fluently: French, Portuguese, English and Arabic, and he has studied Japanese. He also maintains substantial ties to Lebanon, where he lived for 10 years and where he completed his primary and secondary education. He is a passive investor in Ixsir, an environmentally friendly vineyard and wine exporter in the northern coastal town of Batroun, Lebanon.

Ghosn is often hailed as a potential presidential candidate in Lebanon. In a June 2011 survey by insurance company AXA, Ghosn was ranked seventh in a random poll asking Japanese people, "Which celebrity do you want to run Japan?" (Barack Obama was No. 9, and Naoto Kan was No. 19.) He has so far declined such overtures, saying he has "no political ambitions".