Leadership Quote by Carlos Ghosn

Ghosn’s line is a quiet rebuke to the corporate reflex of confusing motion with direction. Incentives feel like leadership because they’re measurable, budgetable, and instantly legible: a rebate, a bonus, a discount. But he’s puncturing the comforting illusion that you can buy your way into a future. Strategy is an argument about what you’ll do that others won’t, and why you’ll win there over time. Incentives are what you reach for when that argument is missing, contested, or failing.

Calling them “defensive measures” sharpens the critique. Incentives rarely create new demand so much as they protect share, smooth a bad quarter, or slow an exodus. They’re trench warfare: effective in the moment, corrosive if they become the plan. Overuse trains customers and employees to wait for the next perk; it also teaches competitors exactly how to hurt you: force you to spend. That’s the subtext about fragility. A company leaning on incentives is admitting it can’t command loyalty through product, brand, or mission.

The context matters because Ghosn’s career was built on turnaround logic - most famously at Nissan, where dramatic cost cuts and operational discipline were paired with a story about renewal. In that world, incentives are a sugar rush: they can disguise structural problems (uninspiring lineup, bloated costs, unclear identity) while making the underlying dependency worse. The intent isn’t anti-incentive; it’s anti-substitution. Use incentives to support a strategy, not to impersonate one, because tactics that defend today can quietly mortgage tomorrow.