Success Quote by Carlos Ghosn

Ghosn’s line reads like a carefully engineered compromise: a nod to glamour without surrendering to it. “Design is important” is the kind of sentence automakers have to say in public, because customers don’t fall in love with torque curves; they fall in love with silhouettes, dashboards, the feel of a door closing. He repeats himself - “important… an important dimension” - not for poetry, but for emphasis that still sounds measured, like a CEO avoiding the trap of sounding either philistine or frivolous.

Then comes the release valve: “It’s not the only one.” That’s the executive’s quiet correction, a preemptive strike against the stereotype that design is surface-level seduction. In one breath, he reassures designers and marketers that he gets the emotional hook, and reassures engineers, financiers, and regulators that aesthetics won’t hijack the product. The subtext is organizational politics: design departments want authority, engineering wants control, and profitability demands both stop fighting long enough to ship something people will buy.

Context matters because Ghosn’s reputation was built on ruthless operational discipline in an industry where margins are thin and mistakes are expensive. For a turnaround-minded leader, design can’t be treated as either a vanity project or a mere styling exercise; it has to earn its keep alongside cost, reliability, safety, and brand coherence. The quote works because it performs leadership in miniature: praise the visible, insist on the invisible, and keep the whole machine aligned.