#30AnsDéjà - Bruno & Stanislas Lacroix

Perhaps a point that was mentioned in the introduction: it's true that this company has built itself largely on a regulatory and normative foundation, on its understanding and mastery of techniques and expertise. The transformation currently underway is to turn much more towards customers, users, and consumers, and to be able to strike a balance between technical expertise and customer orientation. So the decisions or major strategic axes you mentioned—innovation and orchestration—have enabled this industrial success.

The major axes we are pursuing are of different natures. The first, inherent to our business, is to provide high-performance solutions that guarantee indoor air quality and comfort through aerodynamics and ventilation systems. So the first important point for us is to work on mastering tomorrow's techniques and technologies to be able to offer them in the most accomplished way to the entire chain of users and customers. Second, we must adapt our industrial tool, which is fundamental because maintaining competitiveness means knowing how to adapt your tool, make it flexible, and give it the dynamic needed to adapt to these new technologies. So a lot of focus on these elements. And then, as I mentioned earlier, the importance of listening to the evolution of our clients' models to be relevant to their own expectations and needs.

Let me take a bit of history on this as well. When we wanted to start international activity, the problem was that mechanical ventilation markets hardly existed outside France and the Scandinavian countries. So we started by setting up small subsidiaries, assuming we would accompany the development of these subsidiaries with the development of the markets. That wasn't a very good choice; we lost quite a bit of money. In the end, we refocused on a few countries where we have a real capacity for business development with genuine market development. Outside Europe, we chose the North American market, where we design, manufacture, and sell products for North America. We do the same in China: we design, produce, and sell products for the Chinese market, because there is nothing better than being on your market to design the right products. In Europe, we are in a number of countries with production units that correspond to specific products, like large air handling units in Scandinavia. That's roughly the development scheme.

Born in Lyon on Rue Étienne Richerand, actually. We started and continued to develop in Lyon on Rue Feuillat before moving to Vénissieux. But we confirmed the interest of this positioning because we are in a region with enormous economic advantages. There is a fantastic economic fabric of subcontractors, suppliers, laboratories, service companies—everything to support us. I have always believed that a company cannot develop alone in a desert; it needs to be completely inside a network and economic fabric to develop and radiate from there. Based on these elements, I fully share that our new headquarters was designed to be completely interactive with its territory, with a logic of openness for employees among themselves to allow more exchanges and interactions, and also we wanted a building that opens up to our partners and the entire ecosystem we need to function. So it's a building designed in a somewhat special way, with a set of zones and experiential possibilities we want to offer all our stakeholders. It's a building imagined quite differently, far beyond simple and classic offices. The concept is interesting.

I don't know if we put much plural in the years to come in the visibility we have. That's perhaps the first factor: we are learning to pilot, manage, and live with an increasingly short time horizon and a need for constant readaptation. I think that's one of the first rules we now know quite well in our companies, which was a necessity with COVID but reinforced by this crisis we are experiencing, which forces us to rethink our business models, the way our employees function and interact. Let me take another example: the supplier relationship. The classic relationship we knew until now is dead, if I may simplify. For example, our motor suppliers today ask us for visibility beyond two years, saying if you don't order or give forecasts beyond two years, we won't be able to support you tomorrow. So the simple usual relationship of 'I order, you deliver' is completely over. We need to enter a partnership logic because you can imagine that two years ago we were unable to know the market speed or the exact quantity we would order for certain components. So this crisis forces us to reinvent our relationships and operations, and also to accept having a very clear vision that is challenged every day, and to build a path that is as simple as possible for our employees. It's a combination of long-term and short-term. I think companies can, like Disney, adapt in the short term as long as they have a strategic anchor and a particularly solid vision that allows them to adapt in the short term.

I wouldn't call it natural. I think it was a journey that forged us, structured together, and led to a general management. I can say that one day we said, 'Okay, it will be like this, and we'll organize it in two years, three years, five years.' I think very simply, we lived things as they came and made sure it was possible.

If we talk about governance, especially today, I would link it to the importance of rapid decisions. As you situate it, I am president of the management board, so we have a three-person management board that coordinates, gives vision, works on important structuring elements for the teams, with a CEO who handles more of the operational performance with a 360-degree vision, and a deputy CEO who focuses on marketing and sales. So this trio's objective is to constantly regulate and function together. We are no longer on directives as before; we meet almost every day, mandatory every week, with the goal of constantly adapting decision-making and recalibration for the teams. So it's common functions, one head, ensuring the teams always have the right impulses to work. Then we have a more classic executive committee, but I highlight this organization between a management board, a shorter team for faster impulses, and an executive committee to ensure alignment of the entire mechanism of our industries, so that it operates at an adapted speed and rhythm, in a logic of performance generation compatible with operational excellence.

There are perhaps two or three tones, at least two I have in mind. One is more about the social body of the company, the need to rethink how companies are organized and structured. We have a very clear challenge of attractiveness with the talent issue that is critical today and will not improve in the coming years. So first point: how do we make the company's project resonate with potential actors? We need a lot of clarity, transparency, a project that is extremely complete without being complex, so that people can identify with it and want to contribute and share. The second complexity in seeing the company differently is that we know the time each person will accept to devote in a life to a company project is no longer a full professional life but rather a sum of dotted lines of different projects. We need to learn to move to teams that will be in permanent renewal, managing continuity because we work on a long cycle, and being able to welcome for a period a project, a time, in modes that may be less organized and structured than today's defined employment contracts. So that requires reinventing ourselves on this point. The second point for me is the company and its general environment, where we are impacted by the energy and ecological transition. Every company must rethink its project's coherence with these expectations and its activities, and their coherence with these two challenges. So many questions to address and a lot of pressure, since we have a political challenge to manage these transitions at a relatively fast pace, which is accelerating at the moment. And once again, the Russo-Ukrainian crisis unfortunately adds nothing to all that, it even exacerbates the pace. So there is really a need to understand, situate, and position the company well in this transformation.

I think it's very much in the same lineage. Both of us gain by being in these bodies, associations, unions. We gain a lot; I tend to say we gain almost more than we bring. It's very nourishing and very important. We were talking earlier about the soil and the importance of the soil's richness for our industries. If we don't enrich the soil, it doesn't work. So we nourish ourselves today on this regional or national soil, and we also need to put some fertilizer and spend time so that this fertilizer feeds the soil. That's also my philosophy on the major commitments I have.