Jean-Pascal Tricoire: Turning Sustainability into a Growth Engine

Thank you very much John Philip for having me today and it's great as always to be with you.

Look, that's a question which people don't ask me normally, but yeah, I was born in a small village of France. Remote place, 3,000 people in a very rural community. To give you a sense of that first part of my life, I took my first train when I was 14 and didn't take many, my first plane when I was 23. So while I would carry...

Yes.

Yeah. Another we had cars and we had mopeds and bikes actually. But

What it tells you is that the first part, the first 20 years of my life, were deep into a very cohesive community where everybody knows each other and where everybody, whatever the social level, is connected and where I had to pay my studies, to participate to the living of the family, to do a lot of works to keep going. What I've learned from that time is certainly I think to be grounded in reality and it's good to have ideas but it's even better when you can drive it into action, certainly a very deep sense of teamwork, working in communities, integrating all the impacts of what you do in the communities around you, and probably even more important, an insatiable appetite to discover the world. Because when you've been in the same environment somewhere, even if you've done tons of things, you've led associations, you've done tons of different works, you've participated in multiple events, you are part of a generation where everybody knows each other and you've done so many things together. My appetite was really to do something different and to go for the world which I've done in the next phase of my life where I've probably one of the most traveled persons. I've been to more than 100 countries and developed the internationalization of Schneider but never lose insight.

Look, those were very happy times. I remember all those times are very happy. We were a very united family and when you speak about families in rural France of that time, those were numerous families, number of people, cousins like who can count them, and a very lot of friendship beyond family, tight ties with your family and with all the friends in the village. So number one, very happy. Number two, what you do is always collective. There is nobody sticking too much its neck out. It's about succeeding together, dealing with things together, making the village and the community progress. When there is more work on one side, everybody sorts of rally there and help somebody to do it, and then everybody goes back to the next task. Those were humble times. While we were all very happy, we didn't have much money. And that means that you know how to live on a shoestring, and you know the value of money really, and I think I've kept that for the rest of my life. And I think what I kept from that time certainly is the fact that everything we do should be related to the impact it does to the real life of people. And I've been even in my later part of my life where I was leading the company, more passionate about the micro, the way decisions we make will impact the motivation and the way people behave, than by the macro, the big figures. I have to say we developed Schneider tremendously in new economies, in emerging countries which by definition are starting from the rural stage, and I always felt very connected wherever I was living in those new economies, whether it be in Africa or at the beginning of our operations in China, because the people I was meeting had the same history as me. They were coming from the rural, from the countryside, and then they had immigrated to cities, and then they were starting new business, and then they were developing and discovering the world. So it was easy to feel connected, and still as of today I still often go to the countryside to see what's happening, to reconnect to those origins.

Certainly, but I wouldn't be specific, this is shaping you all the time, but I think my origins connected me a lot to nature. Not only because we are living in the countryside and you are truly working in the nature, but also we had created with France or we were developing a sports club. My passion was whitewater kayaking which in the west of France can be a very cold and very demanding sport. And I spend by passion my free time in sort of small expeditions in rivers which by definition are very isolated from the world and where you see all the richness but also fragility of ecosystems, between the water, between nature and the connection it has with development of society, and that has remained a really powerful driver of everything I would do: making sure that as we develop new technologies, new solutions, we would also make sure that they would participate to the preservation or the regeneration of nature.

Hey look, being a farmer is probably one of the toughest jobs but also certainly the most useful job on earth. But it's really tough. If you are in France for instance, you're going to be facing, or in Europe at large, you're going to be facing a mountain of regulations, a growing amount of regulation, at least an avalanche at times. You're going to be facing consumers who want the lowest prices on whatever they say. They are ready to buy your competition which is coming from the other side of the world on maybe not exactly the same standards. And at the same time you're going to be facing purchasing power of very large retail chains, and at the same time you are still doing probably the most important thing in any country which is to feed the country.

Yeah. I look at my friends who are farmers, right? And they are incredible innovators and entrepreneurs. Forget the image of people who are just doing things like in the old times and they are very conservative. They are truly knowledgeable of what they do. They use IoT. They've embraced in my region renewable energy. They've covered their roofs with solar panels. Last week I was actually with some of them who have invested in windmills to power their installations and to decarbonize what they are doing. They are trying to combine nature-friendly or more natural ways of doing and at the same time being productive. So it's on one side an incredibly interesting sector in terms of innovation and experimentation. It's an incredibly entrepreneurial sector because those people, those trades, they are truly entrepreneurs and very often at the scale of the family because they work together on the farm, and at the same time I don't think they get the right recognition for what they are doing. Now where I'm more optimist, I think all of us have realized that quality of food is really important, that we've really done crazy things in the past decades at this level, and there is a comeback to that very important know-how which is about farming. I see also with certain interest people coming from cities and going back to the countryside and trying to start being a farmer. Look, I know what it is. I think it takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of resilience to do it.

But more so a lot of knowledge. So we need to find a way to attract more people to stay in the rural environment and to take care of nature and more so to feed us with good things, right? Because at the end of the day, it's the most important thing we do in life is to get well-fed.

Look, going to an electronic school was for me transitioning from the primary sector to the world of technology, and nobody really in my family had done any technology. So it was really the discovery of that, since like Jurassic. It was the arrival of the first microprocessors. When I said I've been an electronics engineer and they were not yet PCs, that seems like really old, right? We kept learning over that. But going through one year at the business school was a true revolution because it was about business, right? And my environment before was not that. So well, I still have a very marked accent also in my way of speaking English. That's...

That's my carrying the French flag around the world. But this is also the time where I started to learn really English and to open to the rest of the world. So a real learning about marketing, branding, learning about finance of course which I felt more comfortable with because somewhere finance is the engineering side of business, but it's a rational part of business.

Yes. But really I was fascinated by discovery of other companies, all the aspects of how you... and I came out of this training saying that at the end of the day it was really important for me to choose a path where I would have an impact. I would do something that would try to solve a big problem which I felt connected to. Number two, that it was important that I would make what I would do relevant, that people would understand what I was standing for, people would understand what my company was standing for, and people would come to work for the company because it was a true identified and unique reason to do it. So that imperative of being relevant and being differentiated really stuck with me all over my career. And then again, really a big appetite to discover the world because at that time I've still not taken my first flight.

You spoke about my root, Jean Philip, there is one thing I didn't say: I come from a very, very special part of France, right?

Which is called Land.

That is probably the last region in France that had a sort of massacre. 20% of the population got killed during the last civil war I would say that happened in France. And that impacted a lot my way of thinking. On one side, of course, I'm very French and my ancestors all went to participate into the wars and thank God we don't have any since I was born. But at the same time, we learned from that time that people should be very definite of ideologies, things that oppose people to people based on just ideas. On the second point also, the core marker of my region because we had 20% of our people that was still in the memory of my family where this happened also by the government somewhere is that on one side of course you have to be a patriot, but on the other side you don't have to depend on the government, which is not very French. So if you look at this part of France, you have no job people. The jobless rate is very low. You have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies created because we've learned in a rather recent history that was 200 years ago, recent enough that people would remember that on one side we want to belong, but on the other side we need to rely on ourselves to deal with our life. And that has also been a profound cultural foundation for what I've done in my professional life. Make sure you rely on yourself and make sure that you with your community work on your future and don't beg for help on those kind of things.

Look, very simply, I didn't know what I would like to do, right? And I had nobody in my direct surrounding who could tell me what I could do, where to go. I mean, nobody had been international, nobody had been working in tech, nobody had been really in business.

So I tried with several missions. Some of them were internships where I tested some of the companies. One of them was a junior enterprise mission which was going for Saint-Gobain for the first time. That was my first flight to Korea to make a market with zero money. So that was really interesting. So there you really appreciate to have been brought up in humble conditions because you can really live on a dollar a day and still go to see customers. So anyway, those were the testing periods and I was really looking for a company that would offer the right environment and then give me an opening to international career and then be linked to something I would relate to.

And this is where one year just at the end of my MBA after having done those things, I entered a French company called Meron.

Which was based actually in the Alps, which connected very well with my passion for kayaking. As I like outdoor, I wanted to learn skiing which I started at that time. So it was a personal part of my life, but more so it was one of those midsize companies that was really trying hard to go international and in a sector which I thought was important for the future, which is energy.

Yeah. Well, I mean this developed as we are going. But it was a time where energy was starting to integrate electronics. And they were looking for somebody who would dare to do the first joint venture done by the company. So I embarked in a first job that nobody really wanted, which was to work with a German competitor company called at that time to develop a line of product that would compete with our biggest French competitor at that time, mechanic.

And that's probably explains why you ended up being a leader taking on bolder risks and challenges because you never hesitated to raise your hand to go for jobs that very few people wanted to do. It's yeah, look, maybe at the beginning I did it by necessity because you have to take the jobs that nobody wanted, but more by taste because I'm always struck that when people ask for a job they normally ask by how much turnover and how many people, and these are really mainstream jobs which by definition are more about managing than creating. But I've always been attracted by jobs which would be new sectors, zero turnover, zero people, and that you have to develop because then you can really build something new, build from scratch, and then you're going to succeed, fail, but at least you've done something where you learn much faster and you've tried.

Yeah. Well, the good news is that the company has evolved so much from that time, right? We've moved it so much. But look, I really relate to what you said. When I came to the corporate world coming from my origins, I was still largely that guy from that village, right? And I want to remain that guy actually, and I will always. You can take the boy out of the village but you can't take the village out of the boy. But on the other hand, I thought it always helped me to bring something different, a different look at things, probably more provocative, probably more detached, probably less compliant. When I say compliant in terms of compliance with the mainstream, of course compliance with ethics, I think rural origins are good education to strict compliance to ethics. But it gave me that sort of capacity to look at things in a different manner and look at it also from the impact it brings to real people. I call them real people, real life, family lives on the ground for many, and to stay connected and grounded to reality. But this learning of the corporate world was like for any of us really a big shock, a huge discovery from starting to travel, having some international meetings, doing R&D with a German company, learning different cultures. And I remember it as a great moment of my life. For me, it was like starting a new phase after those 20 years of specialization in that rural village life, going into that new phase. So, and I always found that one of the ways was really to deeply connect with the people I was working with inside and outside the company. Humor is a good way to deal with differences, right? Bringing good sense of humor. The other thing is taking almost systematically jobs that people didn't want gave me a lot of freedom so that you could experiment things or put into place models, organization, teams which were not existing anywhere else and prove that it could work and actually work better and faster than what was in the mainstream. And that was a choice, right? Not to be sort of prisoner or formatted by the mainstream but try to experiment new things on the sidelines.

Not really. I remember it as a pretty lone discovery.