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What Is The True Story Behind Nissan And The Fall Of Carlos Ghosn?

If you’re a business leader living in Japan who can speak English, there’s no doubt you heard about the fall of Carlos Ghosn. Mr. Ghosn, the Lebanese born, Brazilian raised, French leader was famous in Japan for coming in and cutting costs to help Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy.

Ghosn and Michael Kelley, his close lieutenant, were arrested in Tokyo for lying about their finances. The Western media and many highlighted the fact that Japan prosecutors can basically hold someone indefinitely while they investigate an issue (without filing charges). Truly, this is a problem, but Japan is famous for being a safe and orderly country for a reason.

What exactly happened to Carlos Ghosn?
Early on, in November 2018, there was a lot of speculation about how the former icon was arrested. However, the Wall Journal took a deep dive into investigative reporting to flush out the facts. You can read that for yourself here. But what exactly happened?  Here’s a quick compilation we did here in country via Japanese and foreign readily available information.

  • Ghosn overstayed his welcome as the boss of Nissan. 63 years old.
  • Ghosn overstayed his welcome @ Renault as well, causing hopeful successors to leave the company and creating a leadership vacuum
  • Ghosn was under pressure in both Japan and France not to show too much income as both societies look down on over-paid CEOs (ie. American companies such as Tim Cook @Apple, Robert Iger @ Walt Disney, Mark Hurd @Oracle, Brian Duperreault @AIG to name a few)
  • Ghosn began to live on Nissan’s money, with houses in Lebanon, France, and Brazil and expensive jets to fly him there.
  • Ghosn represented a move to make a major Japanese company subservient to a lesser French company they felt was a parasite on their performance (despite financing the return from the brink of bankruptcy years earlier.
  • A European shell company was made to move around Nissan money.
  • Ghosn was trying to hide income. Never mess with the tax man.

Some people outside Japan assume that he was arrested for being a non-Japanese. That’s just completely wrong.  The fact of the matter in Japan, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of the law whether you’re local or international (ex. Mr. Horie of Livedoor). The conclusion from those of us in business in Japan is that the Ghosn case will not decrease the number of non-Japanese CEOs working in Japan.  It will just make people a bit more sensitive about how they try to move money around.

No doubt the Ghosn story will continue to unfold. His detention has been extended again. He should be taken to trial, not under continued arrest without charges. However, if you’re at a publicly traded company, you’d better not be gray with the corporation’s finances.

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Time To Delete Facebook #deletefacebook

Facebook is the fantastically successful company founded by a sneaky son of a dentist. They make money selling your details on people.  They generate cash by telling others about you.

Do We Really Need FaceBook?
People use FB for keeping up with friends and relatives. We also look for ‘likes’ from people we don’t really know. Sadly though, many relationships have been broken by FaceBook. People leaving their spouses for an old flame, others fighting over political points that really don’t matter (it’s okay to respectfully disagree), and all sorts of trash talk because people don’t get something the way they wanted. People looking for approval on the platform by being accepted as a friend or being liked. Seth Godin recently commented on how superficial our relationships are on social media, AKA social surveillance media.   A friend is someone you can visit and maybe even sleep on their couch when you visit their city.

FaceBook Shares More Than You Think
Recently with the Cambridge Analytica scandal where Facebook users data was taken by third party advertisers, the world saw how loose Facebook really is. They are tough on bloggers and leaders that don’t share their morals but happy to share our information, posts, pictures as well as whatever we’ve given them as well as those who are connected with us.

FaceBook is founded on the concept of using your information to make money. They have repeated scandals about bleeding user information and giving away our data. The Cambridge Analytica revelations reveal that again. It has become the last straw for thousands.
When the founder and insider of a company that made billions of USD from being acquired by the social surveillance firm says it, it’s probably time to start listening. After all what good really is this company for society?

Time to
#deletefacebook

Copy and paste freely!  Post on your internet feeds and spread the word!

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Amazon.com, The World’s Largest Online Marketer, And Largest Pornographer To Boot

(BrightCitizen.com)  If you are using Amazon.com to buy things online, you will find that in general they are easy to deal with.  Jeff Bezos has done an amazing job turning this money losing company into a money maker.  However, there is a dark side to the story.

Amazon does not allow customers to turn off pornographic content.  You have to see all the trash.  So you could be searching for sunglasses and all the sudden see a porn flick in your search results.  Somehow we were served up a video described as ‘A Lesbian Romp’.  Finding something we don’t want to see that is offensive is not the best customer service.

Someone contacted Amazon customer service at Amazon via email and asked them where there was a setting to turn off the adult/explicit content.  They response was long and unrelated.  You can skip over that below.

From: “Amazon.com Customer Service” <cs-reply@amazon.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 3, 2012 1:07:37 AM
Subject: Your Amazon.com InquiryHello,Thanks for contacting us at Amazon.com and providing us with an opportunity to assist you.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience. I understand your concern regarding searching items on our website.

When you use our search engine to look for items, our system attempts to find the products you’re most likely to be looking for based on the words you entered. Our search methods go beyond simple keyword matching and may also be using information not visible on the search results page, including attributes provided by the publisher or manufacturer.

For books, results may be based on the text of each book, not just its title. That’s why you may sometimes see results you weren’t expecting.

NARROWING YOUR SEARCH
If you are searching across all departments, you may want to narrow your search by clicking on one of the department names (such as “Books” or “Toys & Games”) shown on the left of the search-results page, or by choosing the department name from the drop-down menu next to the search box.

Once you are searching within a department, you’ll be able to refine your results further by selecting the desired attributes of the products (e.g.: brand, size, etc.) using the links shown to the left of the search results.

In some departments, you may also choose Advanced Search from the navigation bar at the top of the home page. Advanced Search allows you to choose which attributes of a product (title, author, etc.) to search for.

We appreciate the time you’ve taken to send your suggestion. I have passed along your comments to our developers; customer feedback like yours is essential in helping us determine what additional features our visitors and customers want most.

I hope this helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Thank you for your inquiry. Did I solve your problem?

If yes, please click here:

If no, please click here:

Best regards,

Vasavi V.
Amazon.com

Conclusion to the story, Amazon will sell anything and everything regardless of what lives it destroys, marriages it ruins, or people it messes up… Amazon will do whatever it can to make a buck.
A good response if they want to be considered the world’s best Customer Service team is to allow users to turn off explicit content as one can on Google, Yahoo, as well as Bing.
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Want To Be Hacked, Tracked, And Profiled? Then You Want An Android Smartphone

If you want to be hacked tracked and profiled, then you should be considering getting one of the Android based phones and installing software from the Android Marketplace.  For most IT departments, it is considered a bad copy of an iPhone.  Clearly, it made Steve Jobs so upset when he saw Google copying his product, he ejected then Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the Apple board.

Very seriously though, the Android market is not really monitored by Google and therefore there is no filtering of software applications for security or quality.

You can check out the tests of the IT engineer who initially reported the danger here.  Professional System Integrator and IT Support firm AINEO Networks raised a similar red flag in August.

For Android, the Bright Citizen word is ‘buyer beware’.