Nissan VP Reveals Secret to Success at Lipscomb Luncheon
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“Seems simple, doesn’t it. But it’s not, or everybody would be doing it,” he told the local businesspeople gathered for the Business Leadership Speaker Series Summer Luncheon.
Morton, senior vice president of administration and finance for Nissan North America, Inc., was the featured speaker for the luncheon, held by the Lipscomb University Business Leadership Council, the Nashville Business Journal and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
The executive, who will be moving to Nissan’s new Nashville headquarters at the end of June, outlined for the crowd how Nissan shifted gears from heading toward bankruptcy in the late 1990s to increasing sales by more than 50 percent in the last six years.
Like its prominent advertising campaign, the company made a SHIFT_ from a “manufacturing-driven focus, to a market-driven one,” Morton said.
Indeed, the biggest problem facing the automotive industry today is not high gas prices or the rising cost of materials and labor costs, he said. It’s simply that car companies don’t recognize the basic truth that “people don’t have to buy a new car – they choose to buy one.”
This philosophy to meet car owners’ unmet needs led Nissan during its revival to revamp its vehicle designs to create a “family look for Nissan vehicles worldwide” and to develop new innovations such as a track and cleat system used to secure loads in the Titan truck, he said.
Investing in new U.S. plants to increase capacity while closing aging, inefficient plants in Japan, also helped in the turnaround, he said.
Morton’s address came just three days before the first Nissan employees will be moving into new offices in downtown Nashville and the day after the company revealed the design for its $100 million headquarters to begin construction in Cool Springs.
During an address to Partnership 2010, the economic development arm of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, also meeting on the Lipscomb campus on Friday, Morton outlined Nissan’s reasons for re-locating from Southern California to Franklin.
Middle Tennessee’s central location, within a two-hour flight of 70 percent of Nissan’s customer base; the state’s pro-business environment; and the lower cost of living were three of the deciding factors, he said.
Morton also brought along a 2007 Nissan Altima, to debut in the U.S. market in November.
The Business Leadership Speaker Series Summer Luncheon was sponsored by BlueCross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Boult Cummings Conners and Berry, Bridgestone Firestone Trust Fund, Caterpillar Financial and Solomon Builders, Inc.