1 Hour with Bouygues Group CEO, Olivier Roussat (NOW Podcast)

Hello.

When I started working at Bouygues or when I started? Because before working at Bouygues, I worked 7 years at IBM.

We start with Bouygues. So I joined Bouygues in May 95 and I joined a company called Blue Télécom which at the time I was the 256th employee recruited of VO Télécom. So it was really at the very beginning. And so I arrived with, I had started at IBM a little before and I left IBM on a whim, leaving IBM where I had a relatively important job. Anyway, I realized it when I arrived again that by difference I could see the gap and I arrived to lead a team of six maintenance technicians. I came from a team where I had 300 engineers at IBM. That's what made me say to myself, well, life is going to be harder. And in fact, what allows one to have a career, there is something important to understand, is that in any case from my point of view, to succeed in a company like ours, you need three conditions. You have to work quite a bit. You have to be lucky, that is, we are very dependent in these evolutions on the environment we are in, the people we meet, and you have to have a little talent. In fact, what is important to understand is that it is in this order and not the other. There are sometimes quite brilliant people who are very talented but who don't work enough or who don't have much luck or no luck and finally it doesn't work. And when you have an alignment of the planets in that sense, that is something that can create an evolution for you. And to be more concrete and understand what I mean by that, so I joined in 95 May 95 at the base of the company and I was appointed CEO in November 2007, that is 12 years later. And when I was appointed CEO, my telecom which probably had maybe 10,000 people at that time. And finally, what allowed me to be spotted to have the chance to evolve? And in fact what allowed me to be spotted was a huge breakdown that occurred in November 2004 which I was not the cause of but where I participated in the resolution and it is finally the way it was resolved that put me in visibility and that made Martin Bouygues who was the boss of Bouygues with a company that at the time had about 100,000 people in the world saw what I had done and that's how I was exposed to Martin. If there had been no breakdown, I would not have been exposed to Martin. And how did you end up in the position that on the day of the breakdown, you were mobilized?

But because it was in the job description. I started, I joined in May 95. After a year or two, I had a slightly bigger job, then even bigger. Then when things happened, I was in 2004, I had a team of about, I don't know, maybe 1000 people and it was the way of getting involved. It had been a very particular thing where we imagined something that is totally unimaginable for you. Imagine that your smartphone could not give you information on TikTok or Insta or Snap for a whole day. Because we were down from a little before 6am until midnight. So it's as if today, at that time there was no wifi, not much anyway. So it's as if today you had your smartphone in your pocket and it gave nothing for all that time. You would not be well, you would be in withdrawal, in apnea, everything would be complicated. And so basically it had been seen, we were on the 8pm news, we were in the newspapers, internet development was not very strong yet but we were on the radio, the thing that had broken down was a disaster actually.

And so being able to restart it and return to normal as quickly as possible was absolutely vital. And finally, the way things were repaired, well, it put me in visibility. So luck is an important point. Having luck doesn't mean I win the lottery every time I play. That's not the meaning of my remark. It's to say that you have interactions in a company. If you are your own business creator, you choose the people you work with. When you are in a company and you rise, you are very dependent on the person immediately above you. And so when you have a relationship that goes well, you can climb. Sometimes you are very good but you don't match with the person above and no matter how good you are, the result won't be very good and it's not your fault. You haven't become bad, it's just that there is no impedance matching between the two. That's why you need luck and I consider that I have been lucky.

Ah well we are a group, we are Bouygues, it's an international group, we are 200,000 in the world and we do 56-57 billion euros in revenue. We are a fairly large company, so we are international, that means half of our employees are outside France and almost two-thirds of our international activities, in our international businesses, two-thirds of activities are outside France. So necessarily to be able to pilot a group the size of Bouygues, it means you have to go outside France quite frequently. And we have another particularity, the Bouygues group is a service company, that is, a service industry. That is, when we build a building, a prototype building. There are no two buildings alike and the expertise of the people makes you more or less competent and more or less fast to do things. And so we are really what we call a people company. We are truly a company whose only wealth is its employees. So our first important point is how do we ensure we have the right employees and that we keep the good ones. So it's a subject, it's solely a human resources subject. Fundamentally and deeply, it's a human resources subject. And so when you have this kind of thing, how do you do it? So my job is to ensure that we appoint men and women at the head of profit centers who already have this quality of human relations to know how to detect people and know how to keep them. And then incidentally, a second subject is to be competent in our trades. And when you have these sums of things, it works well. If you have people very competent in their trade, but who do not have a management style that allows keeping people because they are too directive, too micromanaging that prevents you from doing things, well it doesn't work. And so in a group like ours, ultimately what matters is being truly capable of leading teams and knowing how to keep the best to do our trades. That sums it up. And besides, my job sums up quite easily. A job like mine in this office, what do I do? I know the main managers. When I say main, it's not immediately those who depend on me. I know a bit more than that. I don't know, I know the top two or three maybe. And then my goal is to know, to define with them the strategy of each business, ensure that we have done it correctly and I don't do it for them. So generally speaking, the job comes down to understanding what strategies each of our divisions have and ensuring we have the right people to do it. And ultimately, it's the choice of people that is the most complicated thing. Because between someone who is good at managing a team and someone who is not good, and not everyone has the talent to manage teams. Really not. It's a special thing. The difference is massive. So there you go. Well, it's not very rational, but it comes down to fairly simple things. Fundamentally, piloting a company like ours that has no factory is essentially knowing how to manage men and women. Yes,

You have extremely brilliant people who are perfectly capable of understanding what needs to be done strategically but who are humanly incapable of implementing what needs to be done because they are brutal, because they may be afraid to manage, because in a company there are people who know what to do but are incapable of doing it. You have people who will know how to get things done. It's a set, it's a human community that gives you the results we have. Do you think both are necessary to understand strategy? Yes, yes, yes, yes, everything is in fact people who have all the skills in them, that doesn't exist much though. So the strength you have when you lead the company is not linked to your intrinsic qualities. It is linked to your ability to know how to make people work, to understand what you know and to understand what you don't know to be certain that what you don't know, you know how to delegate to people you will choose who will allow you to have that competence. That's all the job. It's not super complicated.

Ah well after, I became CEO quite quickly. I was CEO at the end of 2007, first beginning of 2007 deputy CEO, end of 2007 so 2 years after and then almost 3 years to be full CEO.

Okay. So it's okay, there's worse, I was 43 years old.

I don't know if it's very young. Let's say young anyway.

And besides, when Martin had called me into his office to tell me that he was quite happy that I became the CEO, it was an interview that lasted quite a short time, about twenty minutes, in which three times he told me 'you are young though.' And at the end of the interview, he said to me 'How old are you?' I said 'I'm 43.' He said 'Ah, I thought you were even younger.' In fact, in 2006, we had attacked a company in the United States following the breakdown we had in 2004 and we had a trial in the United States. And the American lawyers at the time when I was deputy CEO in early 2007 said 'Ah the problem is that Olivier looks so young, it's not credible, we can't believe he has any experience.' Well, that has changed. My old age has come but

No, after I was appointed in August 2016 deputy CEO of Bouygues with the CFO who was also deputy CEO. And then I was appointed CEO. I don't even remember when. Early 2000, I think it was during Covid, early 2020 I think. Anyway, it wasn't a major break in my way of working. So I don't even know, I think it's early 2020 from memory. There you go.

Well, it's not in the day, but in my schedule, it's clearly an important thing because for me, innovation responds to two things. It can allow us to evolve the solutions we offer to clients and therefore it can allow us to be differentiating and thus bring in business compared to our competitors. And the second thing, it can allow us to be more efficient, more effective. And so it's in these two directions that we can look. And third solution, we can have innovations that create new businesses for us and as long as we are capable of developing the group in something new, we might as well do it. So to be able to track innovation, there are two things that we practice. First, inside the group, you have different cells that do technology watch and look at what's happening. We have a small center in San Francisco, another based in Tokyo that looks at Asia and in different areas looks at what's new on different subjects. That's the first thing. The second thing we have is that we start from the principle that there are many things that large groups are not capable of inventing. You have to understand an important thing. In a large group, there are many rules and procedures. Because in a large group, you want to be certain that when you are highly decentralized, you want the way you respond to something to be relatively standardized to avoid ending up with something that will create problems for you. So everything is hyper standardized. Since everything is hyper standardized and everything is done to avoid problems, the consequence is that it literally kills innovation because every time you want to propose something, young people want to propose something, it goes up the teams and they say 'Wait, that will never work' etc., so there are many things that never see the light of day in large groups because large groups have procedures to avoid making mistakes and these procedures can really kill innovation. And so the other essential subject for us is to be able to monitor startup ecosystems and look concretely at what solutions they imagine and see how to integrate startup solutions into what we do. Either by simply integrating the startup's solution, or by buying the startup thinking it will give us a differentiator, it's worth doing. But the presupposition is to start from the principle that a company like ours, which is a large company with considerable resources, can in some cases kill innovation a bit. And so what is the modesty to consider that there are small companies, small startups that can do much better than us. And so it's a real principle to say that it must be a completely open innovation where I can go and look for what is happening outside.

So on generative AI in the broad sense, it's a phenomenon that is rather accelerating compared to what it already was and especially multimodal is something that changes the world enormously. And it's an absolutely certain fact. On these subjects in a group like ours, everything related to generative AI touches what is digitized. That is, you cannot, the first step to benefit from the interest of AI is our ability to exploit data. Everything must be digitized. So the trades must be digitized. If you look at a group like Bouygues, there are two completely digitized trades which are Bouygues Telecom on one side, TF1 on the other. Everything you do at Bouygues Telecom, everything you do at TF1, is completely digital. If you look at the other trades, they are not digital. Well, there is a part that is digital. Most things are traditional brick and mortar or things that are very physical. Nevertheless, in all companies, there is a layer that is digitizing around finance, around HR, around legal. And these things will be transformed by generative AI and especially multimodal. And we have an obligation to know how to listen to what is happening to be able to adapt and integrate it into our way of working because if we don't integrate it, we would find ourselves disintermediated in the medium term.

Well actually I hesitated between three things when I was in my baccalaureate year: either be a fighter pilot, or be a surgeon, or be an engineer. Well, I chose to go into the engineering profession and once I chose a path, I stayed there. So I never reconsidered that I could do something else on the side to come back to that. It was a choice a priori, and besides, I really can't complain about what happened to me in the profession I followed because there are worse evolutions, so I stayed in my furrow. I'm not going to look elsewhere. And finally, with hindsight, I believe that what I know how to do, or what I believe I know how to do best, is actually what we talked about earlier, that is, my know-how is leading large teams. That's what I know how to do. More or less well, but I do it fairly well, and to not be too self-assured, I think that's what I manage to do. And in fact, the other professions we talked about are super solitary things that don't require team interaction at all. I think that in the end, what I did is what best uses what I know how to do. Not everyone does the job that best uses what they know how to do. You have many people who do a job and say 'It's a shame, there is such a thing I know how to do, I don't use it.' My job uses my strong point. So it allows me to get by in the system.

That's it. Yeah, that's the third. Yes, that's it. What I know, in fact, I know how to do two things. I know how to lead large teams and I have a particularly strong resistance to stress. That doesn't sound very modest but frankly it's quite true. No, it's something I have. I don't think it can be built, but on the other hand, if you sum up what I learned during my career, the first job I did at IBM was problem solving. And so the stress that problem solving can create in some people is just work for me. So it doesn't stress me. Crisis situations don't stress me. It's my job. So I don't have, it slides off. So in fact I know how to do two things. I know how to work in a stressful world and lead large teams. That's it. But that's all. I don't know how to do anything else. And ultimately, when you look at what I do, it's leading large teams and we sometimes have stressful crisis situations, so it's knowing how to work with that. That's all I know how to do.

I think I could, but it hasn't happened. Because we have relations with the army, first to support the reserve, and also to recruit people who after their contract are more military. And so we have other relations with the army, but it's not something I've sought. I think it would be possible. Yes.

Well, I don't think you can say you provoke it, but on the other hand, luck, you sometimes have events that impose themselves on you and there is the fact of, how to say, taking the opportunity that presents itself. You don't create it but you can. There are people for whom the situation will present itself and they will do nothing with it. Luck ultimately consists of, when the situation presents itself, doing something with it. What is really important to understand, what people don't necessarily understand, is that when I told you it was three thirds to be able to do things, the three thirds are necessary. When you are missing one of the thirds, it doesn't work. The three planets must be aligned. You need the talent, you need to have worked a bit, and the environment must be conducive. That's what makes things possible. And I have had quite a bit of luck objectively. So luck is important. Napoleon, when he appointed marshals, he asked the generals he appointed 'Do you have luck?' And you have people, I have met people. What I'm going to tell you may seem stupid, but you have people who never have luck. They have no luck. Well, I can't say that. Well, I have a bit of luck.

Yes, yes, certainly.

Well actually, work-life balance is a first important thing. The relationship of younger generations to work is not what it was 40 years ago. When I started working, I'm an old fool talking, but you joined a company and you could spend your entire career there. Now if I ask a young person 'When you join a company, how long should you stay?' They say 'I don't know, for now what I'm doing amuses me, when it no longer amuses me I'll change.' The reasoning was not that. So once we've said that, I never mixed my personal life and my professional life. That is, even now, especially now in the job I have, I could go to dinners every night. I could go to big matches, big shows, the opera, concerts, I could have invitations every day. It's not complicated. I don't want that. I want my life in my work which takes up a lot of time and then I have my life. And the two are relatively disconnected and that's what I call work-life balance. With a simple idea behind it. You have people who live only through their work, if you take away their work, they have a heart attack quickly. They have projected themselves into their work. I don't live through my work. I do my work and I have my life. If you see me on the weekend when I go buy vegetables at the greengrocer, he has no idea that I'm the boss of Bouygues. I'm dressed like a slob, unshaven. So frankly, he can't guess. And it's important to have both because it means that the day you stop working, because it eventually happens, your life continues. So personal balance serves that purpose. Then routine. I am lucky in a group like ours, even though it's big, I never do the same thing twice in what I do. The variety of our subjects is such that many different things come up constantly. So I don't have routine. And fortunately, because if there were routine, if things become boring, I'm like everyone else, it doesn't interest me. And again, I am very lucky, I have a job that is hyper varied, in which I travel the world, meet interesting people, very high-level people. So I have luck. So I don't have that routine. It's clear that if I had routine, the day I feel like I'm always doing the same thing, then I would need to stop because it's not good and you don't do it well. When you do completely different things constantly, you are eager to see it through, it interests you, you learn things. I learn things constantly. I am incompetent on many things. So I still have many things to learn. I am young, that's why [laughter]

First, I changed jobs extremely often. And when you work in a company, there is something that may seem a bit cliché, but in a company, you often hear about the values that companies develop. It may seem cliché again, but we have a real alignment between what we say and what we do. And so when you have the possibility to work in an environment where you recognize the way of working with colleagues, the respect that matters to me, and here we can do things as I consider they should be done, so it's a chance. So ultimately you manage to move within a group that gives you new responsibilities, new jobs, new subjects to discover that are new, and it happens in respect of your approach to work. And younger generations are actually more demanding in this regard than before. Before, there were sometimes management methods that were a bit toxic. That is less common now, and it's partly drawn.

By the fact that the younger generations arriving want a much more contractual relationship with work and are not ready to accept just anything. And it's a good thing, it's up to us to do what is necessary to evolve and know how to take these aspirations into account.