Top 60 Carlos Ghosn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Any job very well done that has been carried out by a person who is fully dedicated is always a source of inspiration.”

— Carlos Ghosn

2. “Employees are your most valuable assets. They are the heart and guts of a company. This doesn’t mean that from time to time, you aren’t going to do what is good for the company.”

— Carlos Ghosn

3. “The time is right for electric cars – in fact the time is critical.”

— Carlos Ghosn

4. “The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them.”

— Carlos Ghosn

5. “Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm, but it’s going to be a gradual improvement.”

— Carlos Ghosn

6. “If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.”

— Carlos Ghosn

7. “Electric cars are going to be very important for urban transportation.”

— Carlos Ghosn

8. “You’ll never convince me there is a hopeless situation or there is any finality in any success or any failure.”

— Carlos Ghosn

9. “I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it’s different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.”

— Carlos Ghosn

10. “You don’t build your character by doing what everybody else is doing.”

— Carlos Ghosn

11. “Profit is the most global aspect of a business, and it is cross-functional.”

— Carlos Ghosn

12. “We don’t want to be something for everybody, we want to be everything for some people.”

— Carlos Ghosn

13. “You have to listen to the people who have a negative opinion as well as those who have positive opinion. Just to make sure that you are blending all these opinions in your mind before a decision is made.”

— Carlos Ghosn

14. “I think that the best training a top manager can be engaged in is management by example.”

— Carlos Ghosn

15. “Being a good leader today doesn’t mean you’ll be a good leader 10 years from now. You have to adapt to the times.”

— Carlos Ghosn

16. “Incentives are not strategy, they are tactics. Defensive measures.”

— Carlos Ghosn

17. “Good is somebody who delivered and allowed the company to overcome obstacles, without leaving a profound impact on its culture. Great is somebody who leads his company to achievements and performance and value that nobody was expecting it had.”

— Carlos Ghosn

18. “When you start thinking about leaving, choose your moment carefully. Go out while you’re still on top, not when you’re no longer in control of events.”

— Carlos Ghosn

19. “Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it’s never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.”

— Carlos Ghosn

20. “The biggest enemy of management is indifference. It’s when people don’t give a damn.”

— Carlos Ghosn

21. “Commitment. This is my favorite word because in some way, people who are committed are always much more interesting and much more reliable, and much more, I would say, deep than people who are not.”

— Carlos Ghosn

22. “I think the new generation is much more demanding about respect for the environment than we have ever imagined.”

— Carlos Ghosn

23. “Business is tough; you need tough guys.”

— Carlos Ghosn

24. “As the CEO, I have to take care of the short term, mid term and the long term.”

— Carlos Ghosn

25. “Don’t believe what I say. Believe what I do.”

— Carlos Ghosn

26. “I always loved cars. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it to you. It has always been with me.”

— Carlos Ghosn

27. “Every single time you make a merger, somebody is losing his identity. And saying something different is just rubbish.”

— Carlos Ghosn

28. “Our objective is to position Nissan in the top rank of the car industry. Until we get there, there will be no rest.”

— Carlos Ghosn

29. “Cars have a large engine in the front and you have a gearbox, which is cumbersome. Electric cars don’t have this problem. The motor is much smaller, the battery is below you. This will allow you to play with different shapes.”

— Carlos Ghosn

30. “When your results are good, you are obviously going to have a lot of press. And when you start to falter a little bit, you are going to have some criticism, and there is nothing abnormal in that.”

— Carlos Ghosn

31. “I mean, when you’re a pioneer and you are at the forefront of an offensive, you’re going to be the most optimistic person.”

— Carlos Ghosn

32. “Synergies are not only about cost reduction. Synergies can be access to markets, exchange of products, avoiding overlaps, exchange of best practices.”

— Carlos Ghosn

33. “I have my family, my children – I have a lot of outside activities.”

— Carlos Ghosn

34. “Talking about stepping down in five years is frankly not a topic of particular actuality now.”

— Carlos Ghosn

35. “What I worry about is not just Nissan, but Japanese manufacturers losing motivation to maintain production in Japan. The high yen is definitely a headwind.”

— Carlos Ghosn

36. “People will always challenge you on an idea as long as it has not been concretized by somebody else.”

— Carlos Ghosn

37. “You don’t implement change easily in Japan unless you explain very clearly why you need to do this change, how you’re going to do this change and what’s going to be the outcome of this change. If you offset or you forget to explain one of these three steps you’re not going to do it.”

— Carlos Ghosn

38. “When you want to turn around a company, you want to make sure that the solution is coming from inside.”

— Carlos Ghosn

39. “The Japanese people are usually very prudent, even when they are convinced change is necessary.”

— Carlos Ghosn

40. “The low price of oil is a headwind to investments in alternative energy technologies, but it will not stop them.”

— Carlos Ghosn

41. “China will be the answer to Japan’s problems.”

— Carlos Ghosn

42. “India is definitely one of the markets where we can expect growth and a potential to do well.”

— Carlos Ghosn

43. “More and more, in any company, managers are dealing with different cultures. Companies are going global, but the teams are being divided and scattered all over the planet.”

— Carlos Ghosn

44. “If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don’t create value in most cases.”

— Carlos Ghosn

45. “Is Europe going to be breaking? I don’t think so. I think the euro will stay. I think at the end of the day Europeans will find the solutions in order to hold Europe together.”

— Carlos Ghosn

46. “To face deflation, you have to have people accepting it and not reacting to it.”

— Carlos Ghosn

47. “It would be easier to make money in other sectors, but since I was a kid, I liked cars.”

— Carlos Ghosn

48. “At the age of 20 I bought a used Fiat 127. This was the only one I could afford!”

— Carlos Ghosn

49. “I don’t believe in hostile moves. I don’t believe they carry any value.”

— Carlos Ghosn

50. “We are facing extreme volatility.”

— Carlos Ghosn