Podcast: Own Your Approach with Philippe Schaillee

Great to be with you. Hello, Bart. It's good to see you.

Yeah, I think it was very similar to many other kids. I had a dad who had an international career who started in marketing, and looking up at his accomplishments, I wanted to follow in his footsteps. There were three things early on that were clear in my aspiration. One, I wanted to go into marketing in FMCG. Two, I saw general management as a career ambition. And three, I wanted it to be international. I looked at my dad traveling around the world and I was like, I want to do that too. You know, you're inspired by your parents.

You mentioned your dad, and he was a great influence on you. What are some of the things you can tell us about what you learned from him? Often times you learn most from failure, right? I saw my dad being very successful in his career progression, but also at a certain moment be confronted with a company that he was working for where he had just become general manager go bankrupt, totally outside of his control. And just observing how he had to absorb the stress and communicate to his family with serenity, and the energy and the belief and the confidence that he would be able to overcome that is certainly something that has marked me and that allowed me early on in my career also to be able to adopt and absorb some challenging situations.

I've been super lucky. I've obviously had mentors who really believed in me at different stages of my career, and I've learned a lot from Adrian Nunn, who was the CEO of Sara Lee Coffee and Tea. A second one was kind of a duo with the CEO and the COO of Sara Lee North America, CJ Fry and Monty Pulley. And the last one is somebody that you both also know very well, the first CEO of JDE, Pierre LS. Super inspiring, smart, intelligent leader who was incredibly gracious in sharing his wisdom. And the shameless plug for that, of course, is that you can listen to Pierre's podcast as well, Lessons from Indeed.

It always becomes linear when you look back, but it isn't when you start. It's funny, when I was a kid, all the kids, I mean we would be playing football or tennis or whatever, building camps. But then there was this one kid who decided that we would organize this whole Olympics over multiple days, and everybody would join, and they would be looking up to me leading that. And then fast forward 10, 12, 13 years later, as a student, I wasn't necessarily looking for it, but people would ask me, propose me to become the president of a Student Association that was founded. And I did it for a year and I loved it. And the year after, I was looking for a successor, and they basically tried to convince me to do the second year in a row. And so I just rolled into it. And probably at that stage started to realize this is something that I like, and apparently people think that I'm pretty good at it, so maybe I have to do something with it.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd start with a failure, and oftentimes people are surprised because you start with that. I think as a leader it's important to show vulnerability. This failure actually happened when I got that job to move to the US as marketing director based in New York, the dream job of every marketer working for Sara Lee at the time. Just before leaving, I had a conversation with one of my other mentors, a gentleman called Christian Vine H, who told me, 'You know what, Philippe, I'm absolutely a believer that you're going to be super successful, but I also give it a 50% chance that you're going to be a total failure your first year.' Wow, that's a surprise. So he explained: you still have to learn to become politically agile in a bigger organization, you're a big idea guy but you haven't worked in a tough environment where every little detail works, so I have to see how you're going to adapt into this environment where you're not going to be working for a company that is market leader but where you're going to be a challenger in a huge market like the US. I said okay, I got it, good advice. I got on that plane to the US and all I heard in my head was 'you're going to be super successful.' I totally forgot about the other advice. And six months into the job, I was failing. Because I came in with my recipe of leadership or leader brands, and I was working on small brands against very big competitors, and my recipe for success was not attuned to that new situation. On top of that, I was burning bridges because I was not very politically sensitive. The defining moment became when I basically mentally told myself, 'I'm done with this, I'm just going to go back to Europe. They're not understanding how I work, they're not doing the right things, I am right.' And where my wife was basically telling me, 'Seriously, I remember that feedback you got. Are you sure that there's no opportunity for you to adjust?' And I did, I adjusted, and it got me back on track, and it became foundational for my future career. So I'm very happy about that. I think a second defining moment was indeed when those two American gentlemen, CJ and Monty, gave me that opportunity to step out of my comfort zone in coffee and step into all of these other categories. And it just pushed me up so much in my career to the next level. And then I think the last one is between a success and a failure, it's an environmental failure, which was when I was at JDE leading the away-from-home professional coffee business, and you had COVID hitting, and of course an away-from-home business gets heavily impacted by this. You're confronted with the sky falling, your business goes down by 70-80% from one week to the other, and you get a lot of pressure to basically take shortcuts, to do things that are maybe not 100% in line with the values that you have. I think there the defining moment for me was to make a decision that I would always have people's best interests, the organization's and our associates' first of all in mind, even though that would mean that you would have to lay off people, but always doing that in a very respectful way, because that's the right thing to do. And always finding that right balance is something that has been pivotal for me also in the rest of my career.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. First of all, I'm pretty consistent in the leadership principles that I convey to every team that I work with, and I do it from day one. It starts with integrity. There's just no shortcuts. It's followed by accountability, personal individual accountability. Discipline is really important to me. Simplicity, which is something that people are always a bit surprised by, but it's just so much easier when simplicity is a core value. And then of course teamwork. I combine that with this saying, and I would never have thought that I would use this person as a benchmark for a quote, Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, who said, 'Always, always, always be the hardest person working in the room.' But I think it's so true. There's just no shortcuts from that perspective. And then the last thing was making the analogy between building a brand, building leadership brands, and building your own leadership brand. I'm a true believer that there is this opportunity to define who you are standing for, what your purpose is, and what your positioning is, and based on that build your career path. But always stay very close to that personal leadership brand identity that you have built.

I think everybody learns at some point after 20, 30 years of career you start building an approach that is yours. I don't know if this is the case for everybody. You probably have people who are really good at startups and scale-ups, and you have people who are really good at high growth smaller companies, or are probably been most confronted with turnaround jobs. And so I built my model. It's not rocket science, but it has a couple of elements that always come back. First element is just always knowing where you are before you decide where you go. It's fundamental knowing your point of departure. And within that, it's funny, in every company where I come in, it's always a bit of an aha moment or ooh moment when you confront them with that quote from Edwards Deming: 'In God we trust, all others must bring data.' It's like, oh okay, makes sense, but that's not necessarily how we were working. So just being so factual and so data-driven in the diagnostic understanding the point of departure before running and rushing into all kinds of directions. That's number one. Number two is always starting with first fixing the fundamentals. Great quote from Pierre: 'First better than bigger.' I've reused it many times, and it's always resonating with the audience. It's funny enough, usually something that they've never heard before, but they immediately connect with it, and it becomes just a mantra: let's make sure that we first fix the fundamentals. And then as you've built that foundation and you want to accelerate, what I call building better and bigger, just not forgetting what those fundamentals are while you're accelerating the business. It's so easy to start growing again and then having to redo the turnaround and rebuilding the fundamentals. And finally, while you're so strongly focused on that growth, not forgetting to build a high-performing, engaged, and winning team. It's the biggest foundation of success, of structural success. And I'm always absolutely obsessed by it.

Yeah, I mean the first thing is my weekends, my holidays are really for family, friends, social life. So it's disconnecting for the longest period of time. I thought that I could do both, so during weekends, during holidays, I could of course check those emails, and it's really not having an impact until I didn't for a couple of days or for a week, and I just realize how much more you're just re-energizing, truly really having that mental disconnect. So the biggest thing to create balance for me is my family, my friends, my social life. I think the second thing is sports. Funny enough, the longer my career has been, the more I get obsessed with making sure that I have my four or five days of sports in for the week, because the more it's becoming important to be able to absorb the business intensity. And then other than that, it's just finding the time to read, relaxing, it takes your mind off things, and in combination with listening to music. I think that's probably it.

Probably not enough, but here's what I am doing consciously. Normally I prepare my week on Sunday evenings. What I usually do is set up, kind of put my outbox offline so that on Monday morning the emails that I've written on Sunday night go out. Because I've learned early on that when people get those emails on Sunday night, I think that is expected from them, that's right, you know. So that's really what I was getting at. Yeah, so that's important. And then also holidays and people in the team. I mean, they always say, you know what, we're reachable. You know, I mean, of course I'm on holidays but I'm reachable. No, no, no, you don't have to be reachable. If there's really an emergency, which there probably isn't going to be, then we'll find you. But just those couple of weeks a year, they're critical.

My real objective is to represent our consumers in my executive team. Our consumers are global. I mean, we're with Costa, we are active in close to 55 countries in the world. I want to represent at least the biggest geographies, and I want to represent the fact that our consumers are female and male. So it wouldn't make any sense to have a 100% UK male, pale, and stale executive team, right? So it's with that intent, and always also obsessed by not making any concessions on quality, that we moved into direction of a more international and a more diverse team, both from a gender perspective and from a nationality perspective. And it's working.

What inspires you in life? One word: growth. It's inspiring to grow yourself, this notion of eternal learning. I mean, hopefully I can live as long as I can because every day is a learning moment. It's growth in terms of seeing your kids grow, your family grow. That's fantastic, it's fascinating, it's inspiring, and it's amazing and always energizing to grow a business.

Life. I love that. And of course, if you could only take one book to a deserted island, what book would it be? That's a tough one. There's one professional book and one personal, more fiction book. Professional is a book I read probably 20 years ago, 'Eating the Big Fish', because often times I've worked on challenger brands and it's always inspired me in the way of thinking, changing the frame of reference, and that way working around the competition. In terms of fiction, it would be 'The Quincunx' from Charles Palliser. Oh wow, yeah, not a recent book, but I love historical fiction. It's an amazing book. I've never heard anybody talk about that before. 'The Quincunx', oh really? Okay, yeah, yeah, it's a great amazing book.