(BEST-OF S2) No. 8: Georges Kern, CEO of Breitling - He risked everything to invest in Breitling

Hello Louana.

So, Georges Kern, actually my real first name is Georg because I was born in Germany. My mother was German, my father was French, and we moved when I was 7 years old. So that's when by magic my first name changed to Georges, but on my passport it says Georg, but only my mother called me Georg. So from 0 to 7, I lived in Germany, in Pforzheim. My father was a jeweler, very well known, René Kern. And it was when Boucheron bought the stores when my father passed away, so I was born and lived in jewelry, in diamonds. He won the Oscar for the most beautiful jewelry of the year three times. He had very, very big clients all over the world. So because he was French, he absolutely wanted my brother and I to have a French education, so we moved to France, first to Alsace, to Strasbourg, where I was for 5 years in a Jesuit boarding school. Yeah, it was okay, but I survived. In Matzenheim, and then I did my baccalaureate at Lycée Kléber, did a year and a half of prep school in Strasbourg, then went to a business school in Switzerland, in St. Gallen.

No, not at all. So my first job after St. Gallen was at what was then called Kraft Jacobs Suchard, so chocolate Tobler, Milka, etc., coffee Jacobs, and after Kraft it was the cream cheese, Philadelphia, etc. I spent 3 years there, and it was in Neuchâtel because the founder or owner at the time was a German gentleman named Klaus J. Jacobs. And after the sale to Kraft, the head office moved to Zurich, and I was recruited at the time, I was 28, by TAG Heuer. And after TAG Heuer was sold to LVMH, I left for Richemont, and that's how my career began at Richemont, where I worked for Franco Cologni. But I told him right away, I want to work as your right-hand man in the context of acquisitions. If I become CEO, I want to become CEO. And I worked with him for about a year to prepare these acquisitions, which was an incredible battle between LVMH at the time, the Swatch Group obviously, Richemont, and others.

Well, at the time it was Vacheron, it was Panerai, Baume & Mercier, and Piaget. He wanted to create a watchmaking division, which indeed happened, and the strength of LMH (IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Lange) was to be manufacturers, so to have technical competence and know-how. And it was about creating a watchmaking competence in the group alongside jewelry, at the time Van Cleef was very small, it was really Cartier, and it was about creating a real watchmaking division. That's why he wanted to buy these three brands. So I worked with Franco Cologni, and that's where I also met Johann Rupert for the first time in all the meetings. I'm not going to give you the details. I'll do that posthumously. I'll write a book and give the details, but not now. And indeed, it must have been sporty. I always got along very well with Mr. Rupert, who is an extraordinary man, but it was a real battle, it was very expensive, and it was the first very large acquisition in this consolidation process that followed this acquisition.

No. So at the time, LMH belonged to Mannesmann, a German group that was sold to Vodafone, a British telecom group, and they wanted to get rid of the non-strategic part of the group, so they put it up for sale. And indeed, in the end, it was a battle between LVMH and Richemont. I was actually in a meeting, that's also an incredible anecdote. We were in London, and I took the car with Mr. Perrin in his Bentley, and suddenly he said, 'We won.' So I was, it was incredible, because we had prepared everything, etc. There was a real battle for these brands, and I remember being in the car when he read the news that we had been able to acquire the brands. At the time, I think it was 3.2 billion for these three brands. And obviously after that, I worked with Mr. Cologni, Mr. Blümlein who was the head of the LMH brands. So Günter Blümlein, who is a legend of the industry, a German engineer who after the reunification of Germany relaunched A. Lange & Söhne with the help of IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre. So they in a way helped the technical development of the renaissance of the Lange brand. And all that was under the control of Günter Blümlein, and after Günter Blümlein became head of the entire watchmaking division, and unfortunately died very quickly of cancer. So I worked with him for a few months, and unfortunately he passed away very quickly. He is also an extraordinary man, and in fact all my life I have been lucky to always work with exceptional men, whether at Kraft Jacobs Suchard, and they all became friends. So at the time, the head of the Kraft Jacobs group was a Swiss gentleman named Nico Niemann, who later became head of Barry Callebaut. After that, I worked with Christian Viros, learned with him, and Luc Perramond, and Philippe Champion, and then with Franco Cologni, Alain Dominique Perrin, and obviously Johann Rupert. So I always had the chance to be in direct contact with these people, I was very young, and I was always confronted with exceptional people who taught me a lot. And Günter Blümlein was one of them. He gave me a book because I was very ambitious and wanted to go too fast. And one day, I have the book at home, he brought me a book in German called 'Kangamet' which basically means the art of taking it easy, the art of not going fast, because he said, 'You're going too fast, read this, and in a week we'll talk about it.' There you go.

You know, you mature with age and you change your style, and you reflect on how you work, how you treat your collaborators, how you approach difficult strategic situations. And even after, I also learned a lot from Richard Lepeu in the group, who was the head of Richemont, a real boss who was my boss, who was not into micromanagement but elevated the debate. So really, the worst for a young person is to have a bad boss or one who is incontestably weaker than yourself. And that is very frustrating, and I never had that impression with the people I worked with. So I argued with all these people, obviously, but always with a lot of respect and great learning.