Toshiba's 'tough as nails' target-setter

Tokyo

TOM Scott, a former US executive at Toshiba Corp, remembers his former boss Atsutoshi Nishida as an aggressive leader who could motivate staff, but also rattle them with tough sales targets and an occasional dressing down.

"He gave me goals that scared the hell out of me," Mr Scott told Reuters after Mr Nishida resigned as an adviser to Toshiba, along with two other former chief executives in the wake of a US$1.2 billion accounting scandal. "Tough as nails, maybe a little like Patton in World War II, but an honourable guy," he said, looking back on his days working for Mr Nishida's PC sales team in the 1990s. "He pushed us really hard, but I learned a lot from him. We all did."

It was this leadership style that propelled the former philosophy student's rise to the top of Toshiba after an inauspicious start as a local hire in Teheran. Now his, and other executives' management style is at the centre of questions over how the nuclear-to-laptops conglomerate was engulfed in Japan's worst corporate scandal since Olympus Cor…