Excellent, right, okay, the long-awaited result. Well, in a place like this you would expect that the vote before the debate would have been overwhelmingly against the motion. 83% of you voted against the motion before the debate, with 17% of you — hang your heads in shame, whoever you were — arguing for the motion. So, drum roll please: the winning team is the against team, who managed to increase their lead from 83% of the vote to 88% of the vote. Please come to the center, do as you wish. So I'd like to again thank — my condolences to the losing team. Thank you very much to all the debaters, give them a round of applause. Thank you so much. So now we enter the last part of this day, before the cocktail, and it's a great honor to receive Florent, the CEO of Michelin. I won't be long on this bio — just to say that Florent entered Michelin in 1997 and climbed the ladder: COO in 2014, successor to Jean-Dominique Senard in 2019, and enters his second mandate as we speak. In this fireside conversation, Lisa Bodo from the accounting department at HEC Paris will accompany me in asking questions on a few topics we've prepared. After that the mic will be yours to ask questions directly to Florent. So Florent, thank you for making time — we know today was a very long day but it's not even over. The first question is about Michelin's purpose. The purpose, for everyone, is: we care about giving people a Better Way Forward. We wanted to ask you how Michelin's contemporary purpose came to be, and to what extent does this purpose personally resonate with you in terms of your origin story and background.
Good evening everyone, I'm very pleased to be with you tonight. The story began in 2006 with the death of Édouard Michelin — the end of a family journey heading Michelin. We had an incarnated purpose through the family, and suddenly we felt lost. A few years later, I was visiting our US operations and the head of the US told me in a fire chat: 'I cannot motivate myself with value creation.' It was a wake-up moment. He said: 'Value creation is a survival kit, but it's not the purpose. It's not the reason why we are together — it's just the reason why we can continue to be together.' Then he asked: 'Why are we together?' We started asking thousands of people around the world: 'Why do you wake up every morning working for Michelin?' We went to BrightHouse, who told us: 'If you can't exchange your purpose exiting an elevator, it's not a good purpose.' We synthesized everything and came up with: We care about giving people a Better Way Forward. On the surface it's about mobility — moving people and things from A to B. But it's also about people development. We see Michelin as a giant people development platform. We do tires, regenerative tissues, next-generation glue — but the aim is to develop people. We want everyone who joins Michelin to grow and become who they are. That resonates with me because when I joined Michelin, I looked very different from today. I thought I'd stay one or two years — 28 years later I'm still here, still discovering things, living that purpose every day.
Thank you for taking us through that journey. I'd like to keep on the topic of what it is to incarnate business and purpose. Michelin's purpose makes sustainable movement a foundation of societal progress, driving the company to develop products that are safe, efficient, and environmentally friendly. Michelin also aims to meet stakeholder expectations while respecting their own values. With our theme being 'Navigating Dissent' — according to you, does stating and executing purpose around sustainable movement generate or appease dissent?
It depends whether you define your purpose just to put on the walls, or whether you use it to arbitrate at critical moments. That's what we do at Michelin. The key issue is how you move from stakes into action. When you operate across 175 countries with 132,000 people, you need more than purpose — you need ambitions, a dream for 2050, a strategy for allocating means. But a corporation is made by people, for people, through people. Without people, corporations don't exist. You need values and a leadership model. At Michelin, everyone is in a leadership position — not just managers. Our leadership model: because we care, 'I care' — I do things for myself and others. For managers: 'Take care.' Very simple, but very efficient. Without that in front of the strategy, you achieve nothing.
Thank you. Going back to reinventing sustainable movement — as an accounting professor, I'm interested in Michelin in Motion, where the company aims to generate 20 to 30 percent of revenue from non-tire activities by 2030, up from less than 5 percent in 2020. What role has Michelin in Motion played in advancing sustainable mobility and reducing environmental impact?
You may think Michelin just builds tires. It is true. But what is a tire? If I asked you to define a tire without using the word 'tire,' you'd face the same challenge we faced. In our history, we've built cars, trains, airplanes — you cannot summarize Michelin as a tire maker. We looked at this differently: a tire is the ultimate life-changing composite — a very smart assembly of 200 materials that cohabitate together for a long time. To make them live together, you need to master composites. We defined ourselves as building the world leader in life-changing composites. Tires are included, but we also work in medical, aerospace, and other areas where the same technical know-how applies. This fulfills our dream — we've redefined what Michelin is and we're defining a new sector for the benefit of the world.
Lisa said the theme today is 'Navigating Dissent.' Michelin has been in the media for several months — from the fair wage policy extended to all 132,000 people across 170-something countries, to the recent video where you spoke at a Senate commission about the cost of labor and French competitiveness. There was also the announcement of plant shutdowns in France. How does Michelin address the tension between financial performance, maintaining the fair wage commitment across all regions, and these plant shutdowns?
In France, we tend to think corporations are like a museum — they should stay forever the way they are. Actually, a corporation is a living body. Like your body, cells are created and others die. If you want your business to be there next century — and my job is to propel Michelin for the next century — you need to accept that things built 50 years ago may not be true today. But it's the same spirit that says: as we care about giving people a Better Way Forward, we want everyone from the lowest to the highest salary to live properly from their work. We don't pay for the transaction — we indemnify people for the time they spend developing themselves at Michelin. However, that doesn't mean we can keep every activity in the same place. When we announced closures at Vannes and Cholet — plants created 70 and 50 years ago in completely different market conditions — the market has moved. If we had to build a new plant, we wouldn't build it there. The same social responsibility that ensures everyone is paid a decent salary says: when we drive restructuring, we do it with two commitments. First, we find a new professional future for everyone — if they want to stay at Michelin they can, but they may need to move; if they want to stay in the same location, we find them a stable professional future. Second, through Michelin Development, we regenerate as many jobs as those suppressed. We've always done this and will continue.
You've spoken about workers. I'd like to continue with your perspective on Michelin's human and social model. Work is a fundamental aspect of human existence, and the meaning of work is elusive. Research suggests workers increasingly seek purposeful, worthwhile work with balance and flexibility, and want to feel positive about their company's social commitments. How does Michelin's human and social model address the meaningfulness of work?
Nobody is forced to work at Michelin — every morning, everyone can choose. Work isn't a transactional relationship of just performing tasks. You develop yourself through work, and through that exchange you develop Michelin, which in turn allows you to grow. This works when people understand why they perform their tasks. We survey all 132,000 employees annually with 80 questions about job satisfaction, management, and strategy understanding. If you perform a mechanical task without understanding its purpose, it creates anxiety — mental health is one of the main challenges facing corporations. At Michelin, every business is measured against three realities: economic performance, people development, and planet stakes. You cannot oppose them. Economic performance and people development are in sync — developing people leads to performance, which generates means to invest further. When I review any business, I always evaluate under three parameters simultaneously: people, profit, planet. What's in it for the people, the planet, and the corporation? Those are intimately linked and give meaning to the work people perform.
We had a debate before about how to govern purpose-based organizations. How do you organize the conversation with the supervisory board and create governance around incentives for top managers so that purpose is material and fairly achieved by everybody?
It's a journey — never exactly the way we'd like. But whether I measure performance on a month, a year, five years, or ten years, it's always those three items: people, profit, planet. We always look at the connection between them. For example, we developed electric curing — curing tires consuming seven times less energy. Better for the planet, better for people because it's not hot anymore, and far less expensive for the company. Everybody finds the right equilibrium. We also constantly check alignment between our ambitions and our dream — sets of ambitions at one month, one year, up to thirty years — evaluated on all three dimensions.
