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They put SCP but actually they have with the talent of spring. Hello, how are you? Hello, everything is fine please. You know that today we have a heavy one in masterclass, right? You know who will be with us. Little quiz: who knows the Wig group a bit? You can raise your hand if you know. Yes, okay. Come on, that's good. Just the main businesses of Buig.
Operator. Yeah. Operator. Building. Yeah. Or construction. Construction. Yeah. TF1.
Yeah. That's all that. How much would you say the turnover is approximately? Whoa, it's in billions. It's in billions. 57 billion and 200,000 employees worldwide. And him, well, he's the big boss. Ah, just in time. Look, here he is. Hello Roussa.
How are you? Very well, thank you for being here. Come, come, come. I'll introduce you. I know you have some ideas about what was being said.
Yes, but they don't know the turnover.
No, that's what I have. 57 billion. No. Yes, that's good. So, this is Olivier Roussat, CEO of the group, I think we can applaud him. Thank you for being with us.
Can I tell them that the Wig group is a conglomerate, or is that not a word you like? The fact of having many different activities like that?
It's a group that is difficult to appreciate from the outside because effectively we do many different things, and for people who observe us, especially financial analysts, we are not what we call a pure player, so they don't know how to judge us well, and sometimes they tell us that we are a conglomerate.
And what is the use of a conglomerate?
Because we have different activities that sometimes do better than others, and that's the answer. That is to say, it is quite rare that all the engines, when we have five engines like ours, it is rare that all five cut at the same time. So it allows us to sail in good conditions.
And off we go for the masterclass of Olivier Roussat, the CEO of Big. Come on, sit down everyone. Come.
In real life, they never meet. That's normal. On one side, you students, you are all in your training, that's normal. On the other side, we have the great French leaders. And on Public Sénat each month, it is our wish, our will, to bring all these people together to freely exchange on the topics that our youth, Olivier Roussat, considers as priorities. Olivier Roussat does not know your questions. So for him, it will be a surprise. And don't forget at the end of the show, for the one who asks the most relevant question, they will be offered 1 year, what am I saying, 2 years, what am I saying, an unlimited subscription at Big Telecom. We can thank Olivier Roussat.
We will survive. Prefer a subscription name at TF1, it costs less. Okay, Olivier Roussat, we have a photo we are going to look at. We have a photo of you. Look at this photo, it was taken at the end of your studies. You gave a presentation already, I say handsome, we can say it already. It's nice. A presentation on what already? And why is this photo striking, saying something about your career and your personality at the very beginning?
So actually I went to a school called Insa, which is called Insa by the way, which was in Lyon, which has a particularity: it's an engineering school that had a structure that still exists called the Humanities. It's a building in which we had things that had nothing technical, where there were things like literature, psychology, things that were not technical at all. I did this almost 40 years ago. So it may seem normal to you today. It wasn't necessarily much 40 years ago. And at that time, I gave a presentation on something at an engineering school in telecom, and I gave a presentation on prenatal surgery.
You can imagine I was not a doctor by training, but what was interesting in this approach was to see how interesting it is to succeed in passing ideas. You have extremely competent people who cannot get their ideas across. And that is an exercise to force you to learn to pass your ideas. And it is useful for later because in a job like the one I have today, being able to pass messages and ideas, to lead people, is important and allows you to develop a pedagogical side. To know how to popularize complex subjects. Yes. Make them accessible, and especially if we want to bring people along, if we want collaborators who understand the reasons why we do what we do, we have to say it in terms that are understandable enough so that we bring them along, simply that we engage them with us.
Now it's time for our student friends who are here to ask you questions, Olivier Roussat. They all have different student backgrounds of course, but they all have in common being engaged since they have done their civic service or volunteer work. And thank you to the Institute of Engagement that brings us together every month. You will be able to exchange with them on their concerns, their interests, with a first question now from Mohamed.
Hello, I introduce myself, my name is Boultif Mohamed. I am currently in an engineering school and a business school. And in fact, the common point between you and me, Olivier, is that I also studied at Insa in Lyon. Ah! And so the question that seems logical to ask you is: how did you feel legitimate to be a director of a company knowing that we are in an environment where society places a lot of emphasis on prestigious schools like Polytechnique, etc. So how did you, as a student at Insa Lyon which is not necessarily the top school, say to yourself it's possible and in front of all these people, you said OK.
First, I never asked myself that kind of question because I never doubted that I could succeed in doing things. The school we went to, fortunately, is not the exam we took at 18 that drives your life, because that would be hopeless. So I never had any complexes or doubts about what I was doing. I started my career at IBM. At IBM, the diploma was not important. And then I arrived at Wig, where the diploma was not important. So we are a structure that is in an environment at Big. The Big group is a service group overall. That is, what is important for us is the personality of the people, the women and men who make up the group. So the diploma they got 30 years ago, I don't care at all. What interests me is how they interact, how they function, do they have drive, are they capable of leading teams? And that is not learned at school. You have it or you don't. So don't doubt anything about that.
So we can very well entertain the hope of ending up as boss of the CAC 40 without having had prestigious diplomas among the most prestigious.
Ah yes, and I think that's fortunate because if an individual's future was driven by what they did at 18, that would be hopeless. So it's not the case. Honestly, it's not the case.
There are important markers in your career, notably the big outage at Bouygues Telecom in 2004.
Exactly. November 2004, November 17, 2004.
How were these pivotal moments accelerators of your career? You need to tell what happened at that time.
Yes, because most of you weren't even born. On November 17, 2004 at 5:50 a.m., I was the network director of Bouygues Telecom, and at 5:50 a.m. the system stopped, well not completely, but a large part of it stopped. It did not restart until 11 p.m. and something, so for almost a day, our customers had no phone. We had a few million customers at the time. At that time, internet was not as developed as today. That means the evening news at 8 p.m. was about the outage, and the morning newspapers published that it was still down when people bought the paper on the 18th, even though it had been working since the 17th. So it was quite catastrophic for us.
It's a big crash. And it turns out that on this occasion, it was one of the moments when my career accelerated. I just told you that I was the network director. So I was perhaps considered as the one who caused the outage, which was not the case incidentally. But what was looked at was not so much the fact that we had an outage, but the way we managed the event, the way we coordinated all our resources to restart. And finally in my career, I had started at IBM, and at IBM I was the youngest manager in IBM France after 18 months, I was 24 or 25 I think. And the accelerator of my career when I became a manager, what was called a first line manager, was precisely the resolution of a big outage that I had caused this time. But in my way of managing events, one of the things I know how to do is manage crisis situations.
When you enter a large company, you can feel a bit small.
Yes, finally, what is the difference between those who stagnate and those who stand out and progress? And apart from that, in this ascent, is there room for originality and creativity? That was my question.
Well, you have to cause an outage and then fix it. No, no, first yes, it proves that you can have very positive situations born from difficult situations, but when you are in the interest of companies like ours, we are huge information factories. You finish school, you have learned to learn, and generally you don't know much. In any case, you have to be aware that generally you don't know much and you still need to learn the environment you are in. And finally, the way you start from zero, whatever diploma you had. That's why the diploma is not a driver initially. And at that moment, the way you learn, the way you integrate things and understand them, we quickly identify people who are better than others, or different from others, in their way of interacting. That doesn't mean... In a society like ours, it's the equivalent of human society. You have everything: people too presumptuous, too arrogant, too shy, too... you find the whole society. And what is obvious is that quite quickly, we can see profiles of collaborators who are people you say 'He is someone, he is going to do things.'
I had a question. You joined Bouygues Telecom in 1996. Finally Big, yes, and you are 95, 95, and you never left, in a professional world where young graduates change companies about every 3 years. What made you stay?
Well, first, I changed jobs quite regularly internally. I joined Bouygues Telecom on May 9, 1995, and started with a team of six technicians. Then I had progressive evolutions. I became CEO in 2007. The company had about 10,000 people. So to go from 6 to 10,000 over a period of 12 years, I changed jobs quite regularly. That is, and that is what we do in a company like ours. Collaborators don't want to do the same thing for 10 years, obviously, they want to change. But in companies with large pools of employees, you have career opportunities and different jobs that you can do. And that's what happened to me.
You don't manage a team of 6 people the same way as a team of 200,000. I mean, what have you kept in your way of being with the teams?
I think I kept... actually, to understand how I function as a manager, you have to go back a bit earlier. I am from generations that had to work very early to finance part of their studies. So I did a lot of manual labor, not easy things. I broke up roads with jackhammers. I did physical things. I still have some back problems from that. And in fact, I have kept a deep respect for the manual work gesture of people who do difficult jobs. So I think the essential thing is respect, recognition of those who know. In a company, you have to understand that in what you do, there are many things that, even if you are the boss, you are absolutely incapable of doing in place of the collaborator. So for that reason, people deserve respect, they deserve to be recognized, to be listened to. And finally, what allowed me to rise, I think, is having kept a lot of relationships with collaborators and having a culture of feedback to try to understand what is not working and try to change it.
How, in 12 years, did you go from 7 collaborators to being director? Because 12 years is still considered very little to reach that stage.
Well, you need a bit of luck, and I had it. No, seriously, you need luck. Not only that, but it is necessary. OK.
Question from Cyrine present.
So my question is: how do you evolve in a family group and how did you gain the trust of the Bouygues family?
Well, the way I was seen by Martin Bouygues was actually on the occasion of that big outage in 2005. I provoked you, I stop that. And in fact, Martin considered that I was not responsible. Which was true incidentally, but the most important marker, I think, was seeing the way I had managed the situation. Then, in a family group, you have one important thing. There are two things that are very important. The first is loyalty. That is, you establish a relationship with a person. At Bouygues, there is a Mr. Bouygues. It's not like there is a Mr. Inis or a Mr. DF, but there is a Mr. Bouygues. So you establish a relationship, and in the report of loyalty, a fairly strong trust is established, and you have the chance in a family group to have shareholders who are there with a long-term strategy. That is, you have many things in modern companies now with everything that happens, many things that can change constantly because there are fads and you have to do this or that. In a family business, there are no fads. We have a trajectory, we follow our plan, and unless it's stupid, we change it, but if it's not stupid, we do it. And the day-to-day noise is not a subject. And that is a great quality. There is also a long-term vision in a family business because it is passed down from generation to generation, and we look less at the short term. Martin says, 'I want a group that will still be here in 100 years.' So take decisions that commit us for the long term and don't do things based on what happens tomorrow. That doesn't interest me.
A question from Justine now.
Hello. So my question is: when we think of the role of the director, we imagine that you have absolute decision-making power. But in reality, when you make a decision, how free are you really and how constrained are you by society, shareholders, or the market simply?
