The L'Oréal Adventure , livre ebook

Odile Jacob - François Dalle

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236 pages

English

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Today, it is difficult to imagine that in 1948 L’Oréal was just another small business. In 35 years its turnover went from 200 million to 20 billion francs. This book reveals that factors such as money or classic management techniques played a minor role in L’Oréal’s growth. For François Dalle, such expansion was due primarily to the adherence of the entire L’Oréal staff to what he called the “L’Oréal Spirit:” an infusion into the company’s “psyche” of a passionate will for conquest and development, associated with indisputable quality and an unquenchable desire to be the first to “seize new opportunities.” This is what enabled L’Oréal to diversify its activities, and to expand them throughout Europe, Japan, and both North and South America, and to endure and overcome the crises of the 1970s and 80s. In 1942, François Dalle began working at Monsavon, a small soap-making company that belonged to Eugène Schueller, the founder of L’Oréal. He was made director of L’Oréal in 1948,first working alongside Eugène Schueller, and became president of the company from 1957 to 1985.

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Business

Economics

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Publié par	Odile Jacob
Date de parution	04 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782738150202
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© O DILE J ACOB , OCTOBRE 2001 15, RUE S OUFFLOT , 75005 P ARIS
Original French title: L’Aventure L’Oréal .
www.odilejacob.com
ISBN : 978-2-7381-5020-2
Le code de la propriété intellectuelle n'autorisant, aux termes de l'article L. 122-5 et 3 a, d'une part, que les « copies ou reproductions strictement réservées à l'usage du copiste et non destinées à une utilisation collective » et, d'autre part, que les analyses et les courtes citations dans un but d'exemple et d'illustration, « toute représentation ou réproduction intégrale ou partielle faite sans le consentement de l'auteur ou de ses ayants droit ou ayants cause est illicite » (art. L. 122-4). Cette représentation ou reproduction donc une contrefaçon sanctionnée par les articles L. 335-2 et suivants du Code de la propriété intellectuelle.
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo .
Preface

by Jean-Paul Agon

The first time I met François Dalle I knew right away that I was in the presence of an extraordinary man.

Because his ideas haven’t aged at all, we wanted to reprint L’Aventure L’Oréal . And because those ideas are universal, we decided to have the book translated into English in order to share his thinking and spirit with all our colleagues throughout the world.

It was he, François Dalle, who, following in the footsteps of Eugène Schueller, ultimately created and inspired the magnificent and incredible L’Oréal Adventure.

“ L’aventure L’Oreal :” a title that sums him up perfectly.

An adventure of democratized Beauty. Because he wanted to make Beauty accessible to the greatest number of people.

An adventure of constant innovation. A boundless creativity that inspires our research and our brands, and which develops pioneering products appreciated around the world.
An adventure of a humanist. François Dalle always sought to put the human being at the heart of the company, and to place the company at the heart of society, always keeping a balance between economic growth and social progress, while drawing from a core of humanist values that remain our own values today. Among them are respect for the diversity that enhances our brands, our personal selves, and which defines our identity.

An adventure in thinking. Always looking toward the future, he anticipated the evolution of business organisations, the emergence of new social relationships, how important it is for a company to be committed to environmental issues.

Today, we understand just how much the fundamentals of his avant-garde thinking have enabled us to successfully engage with the great changes of the twenty-first century.

Because he never abandoned his belief that the consumer must always be at the center of everything, we were the first to embrace the digital revolution that has brought us even closer to consumers.

Because he instilled that ability to be alert, to constantly question, and to be agile and curious in order to “ saisir ce qui commence ”—to seize new opportunities—we are today able to adapt to a world that is changing at an increasingly rapid pace.

Because he understood that searching for real values was essential for our colleagues, and that the company should promise something other than mere profit, our group is attuned to the expectations of younger generations.

He has left a remarkable legacy to us all.

A precious gift as our adventure continues into the future.
Foreword

The idea for this book goes back to a lecture I gave at the Sorbonne at the request of Mme Ahrweiler, then chancellor of the universities of Paris. She wanted to bring together members of the business community and the students in all disciplines for whom she was responsible. A forum had been organized for this purpose, and it was subsequently held every year, called the Forum de la Réusite – the Forum for Success. For the first event that took place in 1988, I had been asked to talk about my years at L'Oréal, and from my presentation to draw practical lessons for the students who would be sitting in front of me. We agreed that I would first do a brief presentation, to which I would then invite the students to respond, in order to adapt my final recommendations to their concerns.
These concerns turned out to be very focused on how they might be able to find immediate success. "What area pays the most at L'Oréal? Which one can promise the most brilliant career? Marketing? Communication? Finance? How do you become CEO? ... " It was the first time since May ‘68, that I was facing a big audience of students and, through their questions, I found that "Power to the imagination,” “Don’t listen to people over 30,” “It is forbidden to forbid”—all those protest slogans seemed to have been forgotten. There was no longer any question of criticizing the system, much less of overthrowing it. Students now unanimously wanted to know what the best way was to become a part of it.
This was understandable. We were no longer in the 60s, in those overall happy times when young people thought they could allow themselves crazy shenanigans without being aware that they were durably compromising the growth of the economy and their jobs. In 1988, on the contrary, France had already endured ten years of double-digit unemployment, and I knew it was affecting young people, including young graduates, twice as hard as other French people. I didn’t hide this from my audience, basing my remarks on the results of a study that I had carried out two years earlier at the government’s request. Faced with such a situation, nothing seemed more futile than the meteorological attitude adopted by so many politicians, both on the Right and Left, which consisted of expecting growth and jobs to come from outside France. On the contrary, we had to convince ourselves that a return to growth and full employment depended on us all, heads of companies as well as workers today and future workers; I felt like changing the name of the Forum for Success to the Forum for Effort.
The atmosphere in which we lived, at the end of the 1980s, shared profound similarities with the one I had experienced before the war, during my childhood and adolescence. In my family, we didn’t want for anything essential, but we lived a relatively austere existence. The attachment of my mother, of Flemish origin, to the Catholic religion, and the social activism of my father, a modest industrialist, shaped our lives. We lived near the factory where my father worked and our immediate neighbors were for the most part working class families. We were well aware of their material problems and their states of mind. We knew that austerity had been imposed on them, that religion did not always help them to bear it, that in fact an increasing number of them were becoming attached to a new faith, and that, their bosses not offering them hope for a better life, they were ready for any revolts that would provide them “rosier tomorrows”.
I, too, sought to revolt, but in a different way. I told myself that there had to be other avenues to take, and that one had to set out to find them. As for my father, he encouraged me to take advantage of my moments of forced inaction (I suffered from asthma and had to spend a great deal of time in my room) to educate myself, and above all, to try to understand the reasons for this stagnation. The Great War, then the Great Depression of the 1930s, undeniably played a role. The Depression had occurred at a time when France had just been bled dry by four years of war, the tales of which as told by our elders horrified my brothers and me. Because the North, where I had lived until I went to university in Paris, was a border zone, it had particularly suffered from the destruction of that war. We heard it said that Germany should have paid, but hadn’t, so that the costs of rebuilding had further impoverished the region. However, our teachers had taught us in elementary school that the North was an exception. Its equipment had been refurbished in the 1920s, and, due to industrial development, it enjoyed advantages that other regions lacked.
I could see, though, that it didn’t know how, or was unable, to take advantage of this. The memory I have of my teenage years, the 1930s, is consistent with when younger, I had already sensed: a succession of social conflicts, harsh strikes, with the occupation of factories and units of mobile guards to evacuate the workers. That was when I started to realize, in a still unclear way, that the material factor, capital, as economists would say, was not enough to ensure development. That required a conjunction of other factors, starting with morale, or what would later be called, in the milieus of competitive sport, the “mental.” But the North didn’t have any morale. We liked to boast about the qualities of our workers, their devotion to hard work. They are people who, under an often harsh appearance, hide a very great joviality. They love celebrations. Every year our little village organized several cycling races and held its Ducasse feast, where municipal harmony reigned. Group life was very vibrant. There were veterans, of course, bosses, but also the soccer club, which I had created, the Longues Pipes and the Buveurs de Bière—all these organizations were very active.
And then, imperceivably, times changed. With the crisis of the early ‘30s, life in our small community changed as well. The workers, who constituted the majority of the village population, raised their voices more and more often and more and more violently, to express, in a strident way, the same complaint about the inadequacy of their wages. Many bosses agreed, but in their milieu they agreed to say that companies didn’t have the means to provide more buying power to their employees. I had no reason to doubt their assertions because their companies, especially in the textile industry, which was the great specialty of the North, obviously didn’t make much money. But that was because th