#Communications Engineering MS in Beirut

[austedu]

Explore the MS in Computer & Communications Engineering program at the American University of Science & Technology (AUST) in Lebanon.

[jtq1844]

Musings from the Car ...

Ensuring that my pre-owned, book-on-CD from a few days ago would be put to good use, I listened to Amy Tan’s Opposite of Fate.  It is a series of essays where Ms Tan’s sets the record straight on a few things like spurious internet-propagated “facts” about her professional and personal lives and what is family-history-inspired and what is fiction.  She examines the synchronicities and hurdles of her writing experience as well with wry skepticism and deep gratitude.  After an essay on how the events of 9/11/01 inculcated themselves into her life, I thought about the same.

Here is an essay I wrote which may be part of a vaguely-realized memoire-style set of essays which might eventually be entitled Living with the Extraordinary While Washing Socks:

 Where Was I on 9/11/01    

     On September 11 every year, someone invariably asks, "Where were you when the World Trade Center fell?"

     I’ll tell you, but first, I have to mention a few things that happened in 1999. The Millennium Panic that year still annoys me because the 2nd Millennium didn’t end in 2000; it ended with 2001.  It’s a math, off-by-one, how-to-count-years thing.  Because of mostly harmless short-sightedness by some software engineers, there was potential for some computer programming problems. The real concern was in regards to mischief-making, troubles that might be devised to be symbolic. My husband, having a background in "thinking like a terrorist” or other kind of trouble-making, headed up the Y2K Preparedness program for Cisco Systems. In brief, they planned for many contingencies and he knew a lot of people.

     The morning of 9/11/01, his cell phone bleeped extra early. I got up and turned on the news. We never turned on the TV in the morning, but this time I did. Mike shouted to me, “Turn on the News. Something happened.” 

     “It’s already ready on.”  We watched the Towers standing there with smoke billowing from one of them, as a newscaster explained that a plane flew into the one of the Towers. It was unclear whether it was an odd accident of some kind.

    Mike quickly dialed the phone, barking orders as he occasionally did, particularly when talking to people in the New York City office.  It's a speech pattern thing.  He said, “Just go with your gut. Grab whatever you can and start walking in the direction away from the Towers.”  The Cisco Offices were located in a building next door to the Twin Towers.  “Just. Do. It.” 

     We watched live footage of the second plane flying into the tower. It seemed like several moments before the building collapsed. The collapse was gratefully an implosion onto itself, taking out a minimum of its surroundings which could have included thousands of more lives. News reports of the Pentagon airplane and Pennsylvania crashes were filtering in. 

     On the house phone, Mike called one of his Y2K crisis management associates on the East Coast. His cell phone rang – it was the CEO. It seems that the big full-time Disaster Management Team at Cisco were at an all-hands, brainstorming meeting and were incommunicado.   (Yes, we got the irony.) Could he please head this up in the meantime?  Of course.

     It should be explained here that the emergency communications center for all of New York City – Fire, Police, Ambulance, etc – were located in the bowels of the WTC Twin Towers. They were gone. Out. Nothing.

      On the home phone, Mike next dialed one of the NYC Cisco people whom he hoped had followed his orders.  “Now, go to a cop and see how you can help.”  In his cell, he spoke to others.  No, that’s not right. He barked at others. This went on for several minutes, but Mike needed to get to his office. He barked back and forth like a General commanding troops over the two lines, occasionally hitting the flash button for call-waiting. I held fresh underwear for him to step into, pulled up his pants, buckled his belt, put on his socks, tied his shoes, buttoned and tucked his shirt all while he spoke with, ordered, devised, advised, and otherwise communicated. Maybe I should mention that Mike had had a kidney transplant nine months before and was on high amounts of steroids making his barking extra barky and his circumference extra challenging. From my point of view, dressing him was a heroic act.

     At one point, both phones were quiet. He went rigid and started to vibrate, reliving his own bombing trauma.  Oh, did I mention his survival of the 1983 truck-bomb into the American Embassy in Beirut as a covert CIA agent? This was how he had gotten his thinking-like-a-terrorist-or-other-kind-of-trouble-making training.  Tears streamed down his cheeks. His limbs were both floppy and locked at the same time. His cell phone buzzed. The tears stopped immediately, his body re-engaged.  “Mike here.  What do you need?”

     He was out the door in 5 minutes with a banana and thermos of tea.

     The remarkable communications recovery caught the eye of Interpol, trying to understand how in 24 hours, after losing ALL emergency communication systems, “How did NYC do it, Mr. Giuliani?”  “I dunno. Ask Cisco.”  “How did Cisco do it, Mr. Chambers?”  “I dunno. Ask Mike.”

     Mike did his part, as did so many people. Because of this and his position at work, he and a few others had an idea. What if every Cisco office anywhere in the world no matter how small reserved a closet to hold an emergency network backbone kit? It could be deployed within hours after any disaster needed communications to help with recovery. Mike doing his best Cap’n Pickard said, “Make it so” to the six gorilla cases in a closet in every Cisco office on Earth. This little plan was tested to its limits soon enough, during the Indonesian Tsunami. Then Katrina and ever since. Under his aegis, his group created Cisco-sponsored emergency vans with communications equipment that drive to disaster sites.  It has made a difference, largely an unsung difference. This is as it should be.

     Great changes at the Dawn of the New Millennium did bare out as the events of 2001 did in fact change everything, just not in the literal sense which to my mind is among the least important.  What other prophetic events would have some credence if we just looked at them another way?

    Where was I on 9/11? At home, washing his socks.

[deniscollins]

The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn

In Japan, salarymen slave away at the kaisha (or company) with a sense of communal pride almost as important as the salary. In 2008, the same year that Japanese law began requiring companies to disclose directors’ pay in their annual reports, Nissan’s shareholders voted to set an annual cap of about $27 million on compensation for all board directors combined. As a result Carlos Ghosn, the Chairman or CEO of Nissan felt he was being underpaid compared to non-Japanese CEOs. If you were a Nissan board member wanting to retain Ghosen, would you help under-report his salary by creating two salary pots for Mr. Ghosn’s compensation, one pot would be paid in the current year and reported in the company’s annual report and securities filings, and another amount would be designated to be paid out after Mr. Ghosn left Nissan, and pay all or some of the costs of his $18 million in residences abroad and family vacations: (1)  Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Carlos Ghosn was tired. At 64 years old, the chairman of an auto empire that spanned several continents and included Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi wasn’t bouncing back from jet lag the way he used to. Melatonin wasn’t working anymore, and he had bouts of insomnia, phoning his children in the middle of the night or going on long walks around his Tokyo or Paris neighborhood. He planned to retire soon, stepping back from spending his life on an airplane, albeit a luxurious one paid for by Nissan.

Last month, just before Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Ghosn headed to Tokyo to meet his youngest daughter and her boyfriend and attend a board meeting. He was scheduled to land at Haneda Airport at 4 p.m.

The daughter, Maya Ghosn, 26, had spent most of her childhood in Japan and wanted to introduce her boyfriend, Patrick, to her favorite places. Bringing a boyfriend home is a common rite of passage, but a particularly intimidating prospect when growing up Ghosn — a child of one of the most romanticized and ruthless chief executives the global business community has ever seen.

Ms. Ghosn had made a 7:30 dinner reservation at Jiro, the Michelin-starred sushi counter hidden in a basement in the city’s Ginza district.

On the tarmac in Beirut, Lebanon, Mr. Ghosn opened WhatsApp and texted his four children on a group chain labeled “Game of Ghosns,” for his favorite TV show, “Game of Thrones,” the bloody HBO drama about dynasties under siege. “On my way to Tokyo! Love you guys!” Mr. Ghosn texted as his jet lifted off.

He never made it to dinner.

On Nov. 19, Japanese prosecutors surrounded Mr. Ghosn’s Gulfstream after its arrival and arrested him on allegations that for years he had withheld millions of dollars in income from Nissan’s financial filings.

Ms. Ghosn was staying at her father’s corporate apartment, and when he didn’t show up she checked with his longtime driver at Nissan, who assured her his flight had probably been delayed. She texted: “Hey, just heard your flight got delayed. Please let me know when you land, worried about you.”

Exhausted from jet lag, she took a nap. Patrick woke her when he saw a tweet about Mr. Ghosn’s arrest. “I was in shock,” she said in an interview.

Minutes later, the doorbell rang. Two Japanese men in black suits slipped off their shoes to enter the two-bedroom apartment and showed Ms. Ghosn a brief note in English.

“There is a case against your father,” it read, according to Ms. Ghosn’s account. “The Tokyo judge has warranted us access to search the house. We need a witness. Thank you for cooperating.”

Fifteen men, also in suits, followed. They locked the front door, told Ms. Ghosn that they were prosecutors, warned the couple not to use their phones and suggested that they might tap the apartment. They rummaged through Mr. Ghosn’s drawers, studying family photos, Maya’s 10th-grade report card, personal letters, her parents’ divorce papers.

“I wanted my dad to know that in this situation I was polite and handled it maturely, and I didn’t want to give them any reason to feel satisfied by an ounce of despair in my eyes,” Ms. Ghosn said. “But inside, I was shaking. I couldn’t stand up. I had to hold the wall.”

Six and a half hours later, at 11:30 p.m., the men left.

Worried that anything they said was being recorded, Ms. Ghosn and her boyfriend went into the bathroom, climbed into the shower fully clothed, turned on the water and whispered about what to do next. She called her siblings to figure out how to tackle Japan’s labyrinthine legal system.

Told by the authorities that she was forbidden to contact her father, Ms. Ghosn waited at the apartment for nearly two days until an American lawyer working for her family called.

“We got very clear instructions to leave as soon as possible for fear of being detained or interrogated to extort my dad,” she said. “So we got on the first flight out.”

‘A Person Who Was Above the Clouds’

Carlos Ghosn wasn’t supposed to succeed in Japan, but he wasn’t supposed to fail like this. He first made headlines in 1999 when, in a nation known for its distrust of outsiders, Mr. Ghosn, a brash Brazilian-born and Lebanese- and French-educated engineer, showed up in sunglasses and a pinstripe suit with plans to carry out an American-style restructuring of a failing Nissan. The Japanese carmaker had $35 billion in debt, provided lifetime employment to a bloated work force and produced a fleet of the kind of cars you’d dread getting at the rental counter.

Mr. Ghosn, then 45 and a vice president at Renault, had helped oversee a turnaround at the middling French automaker, which had agreed to spend $5.4 billion to buy a 36.8 percent stake in Nissan Motors.

John Casesa, then a top auto analyst at Merrill Lynch, advised Mr. Ghosn to rent a house in Tokyo rather than buy one.

“The widely held consensus was that he would fail, that Nissan wasn’t worth saving and it couldn’t be done,” Mr. Casesa said.

At the time, Bob Lutz, the loquacious vice chairman of General Motors, assessed the deal this way: Renault would be better off “taking $5 billion, putting it on a barge and sinking it in the middle of the ocean.”

But Mr. Ghosn, with his severe black eyebrows and puffed chest, was undeterred. He closed factories, slashed suppliers, laid off 14 percent of the work force and invested in design. Six years later, Nissan had surpassed Honda to become Japan’s No. 2 automaker, its market capitalization had quintupled and its operating margin had risen tenfold. Altima sedans, Titan pickup trucks and Murano S.U.V.s made Nissan a major player in the United States market — an achievement that Wall Street once deemed impossible.

By the early 2000s, Mr. Ghosn was head of the Renault-Nissan alliance and the first person to simultaneously serve as chief executive of two Fortune Global 500 companies, the type of chief executive who even if you didn’t know how to pronounce his name (rhymes with phone), you’d know his products.

The enigmatic “gaijin” (as foreigners are called in Japan) had achieved a status bestowed on only a handful of chief executives, akin, at least in Japan, to Steve Jobs, Warren E. Buffett or Elon Musk. Paparazzi swarmed. Fans asked for autographs. Japanese businessmen, eager to emulate the Nissan chief, inquired where Mr. Ghosn had bought his rectangular sunglasses and custom suits.

In 2004, Emperor Akihito awarded Mr. Ghosn a Blue Ribbon Medal for his extraordinary contributions, making him the first foreign business leader to receive the honor. A manga comic book, “The True Story of Carlos Ghosn,” heralded a shadowy hero from a faraway land. Lebanon put Mr. Ghosn’s face on a postage stamp.

But even as many in Nissan celebrated the comeback, others scoffed at Mr. Ghosn’s celebrity.

From the start, he faced distrust from the Japanese policymaking and business establishment. The very idea of an outsider’s bringing free-market capitalism to Japan’s quasi-socialist corporate culture jabbed at historical wounds.

“When MacArthur came after World War II, the Japanese just surrendered to his leadership,” a retired Nissan executive told Newsweek.

Mr. Ghosn pulled on a white jumpsuit to tour factory floors, but beyond the photo ops, there were signs that his splashy — some would say autocratic — presence was out of sync with modest Japanese culture. In 2004, Mr. Ghosn grazed a motorbike while driving a Porsche in the Roppongi area of Tokyo, a haven for moneyed foreigners. (The couple on the bike had minor injuries.) The Japanese media groused that Mr. Ghosn wasn’t driving a Nissan.

Then the man whose militant approach to cutting jobs (21,000, if you’re counting) earned him the nickname “Le Cost Killer” spent more than $200 million for Nissan to be a sponsor of the Rio Olympics in 2016, casting himself in the Olympic torch relay. He hopped between homes paid for by Nissan. In 2017, he paid a Lebanese artist and friend $888,000 to create a statue, “Wheels of Innovation,” for the entrance of Nissan’s Yokohama headquarters. (Having a lavish second wedding reception in Versailles the same year, with Marie Antoinette-themed costumes and, yes, lots of cake, did not help.)

“He was a person who was above the clouds,” said Yuichi Ishino, who worked in Nissan’s finance department from 2002 to 2005. “No one dared to say anything that would confront his opinions.”

The stickiest issue was always Mr. Ghosn’s pay.

In Japan, salarymen slave away at the kaisha (or company) with a sense of communal pride almost as important as the salary. Last year, Mr. Ghosn made $16.9 million ($8.4 million from Renault, $6.5 million from Nissan and $2 million from Mitsubishi). That’s nearly 11 times what the chairman of Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, earns but well below the $21.96 million paid to Mary Barra, the chief executive of General Motors.

In 2008, the same year that Japanese law began requiring companies to disclose directors’ pay in their annual reports, Nissan’s shareholders voted to set an annual cap of about $27 million on compensation for all board directors combined.

After that, Mr. Ghosn made the case to the public that he was underpaid — instructing Nissan to hand out background materials reminding investors and the news media that he made significantly less than his counterparts at other global automakers.

At the company’s most recent annual meeting, in June, Mr. Ghosn stressed to shareholders that the company’s compensation policy was “designed to reward performance and to attract, promote and retain the best management talent in the auto industry.” He added that while Nissan tried to reward senior management “competitively,” the company remained “financially very disciplined.”

Asked by the Financial Times that same month if he was overpaid, Mr. Ghosn laughed. “You won’t have any C.E.O. say, ‘I’m overly compensated,’” he said.

Such brazenness rankled employees and the public in Japan.

“Even when a company is a global multinational company, it’s still stamped by its country of origin and the place where it has its headquarters,” said Sanford M. Jacoby, a professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied Japanese corporate culture. The Japanese, he said, put more weight “on egalitarian policies of government and pay and other things.”

In France, where the government owns a 15 percent stake in Renault, shareholders have also taken issue with Mr. Ghosn’s pay. “We believe that anyone making 240 times more than the minimum pay of his employees is out of control,” said Pierre-Henri Leroy, the head of Proxinvest, a French shareholder advisory group.

In October, a whistle-blower inside Nissan said he had evidence that Mr. Ghosn had been instructing Greg Kelly, a top aide and a board member, and a small group of confidants at Nissan to effectively create two salary pots for Mr. Ghosn’s compensation.

One pot would be paid in the current year and reported in the company’s annual report and securities filings. Another amount would be designated to be paid out after Mr. Ghosn left Nissan, according to a person familiar with Nissan’s internal investigation. The whistle-blower’s findings were sent to Hiroto Saikawa, the company’s chief executive, and an internal auditor.

Nissan went to prosecutors with allegations that Mr. Ghosn, working directly with Mr. Kelly, who was once the head of human resources at Nissan, had underreported his income from 2009 to 2017, according to a person with knowledge of the internal investigation. Nissan’s investigation found that the underreporting had occurred when some of the compensation, though committed, was deferred and not reported in securities filings.

Nissan also told prosecutors that it had evidence Mr. Ghosn and Mr. Kelly developed plans to pay Mr. Ghosn a further $124 million in cash and other financial instruments, some as compensation for a future advisory position for Mr. Ghosn.

Hari Nada, a Nissan executive and confidant of Mr. Kelly’s, sent a private jet to fly him from Nashville to Tokyo for the same board meeting that Mr. Ghosn planned to attend. The two men were arrested hours apart. Mr. Kelly’s family said Mr. Nada had assured him that he would be back in Nashville by Thanksgiving, in time for scheduled neck surgery.

Nissan would not comment about the Kelly family’s statements about Mr. Nada. Mr. Nada did not answer phone calls seeking comment.

Mr. Kelly was released on Christmas after his family cited his ill health and posted bail of 70 million yen (about $640,000). His lawyer in Nashville, Aubrey Harwell Jr., said his client denied wrongdoing. Mr. Kelly and Mr. Ghosn “had conversations regarding legal ways they could defer compensation,” Mr. Harwell said.

Mr. Ghosn, Mr. Kelly and Nissan itself all face charges they violated financial reporting laws. The company’s board removed Mr. Ghosn and Mr. Kelly as representative directors, positions with power to sign company documents.

Thirty-two days after Mr. Ghosn’s initial arrest, when his release on bail appeared likely, the Japanese authorities rearrested him on new charges that he shifted personal losses during the 2008 financial crisis temporarily onto Nissan’s books. On Monday a court extended his detention until Jan. 11.

That Mr. Ghosn may have deceived regulators while enriching himself runs afoul of cultural norms in Japan, where the public is more likely to forgive corporate cover-ups when executives appear to be protecting the company.

“Although you don’t see it written down, there is almost a social consensus that ‘OK, you did your crime, but you did it for the company,’” said Seijiro Takeshita, dean and professor at the School of Management and Information at the University of Shizuoka.

Or as Jesper Koll, who has worked in Japan for decades as an economist and is head of Japan for WisdomTree investments in Tokyo, said: “The one thing that Japan does not want and would never tolerate is personal greed.”

‘As the World Ghosns’

Mr. Ghosn’s longtime driver has been out of touch since shortly after the arrest. The driver told the Ghosn children the day after their father was detained that the Japanese authorities had found his car in Tokyo. They tore up the leather seats and found only cat food.

Mr. Ghosn’s chief of staff, Frédérique Le Greves, who arrived in Tokyo the same day as Mr. Ghosn, has not made any statement and returned to France after she learned of the arrest, a person close to the Ghosn family said.

VERY LONG ARTICLE CONTINUES