Point de vue de Jean-Paul Delevoye aux Assises du Numérique

Je vous propose de visionner cette vidéo de Jean-Paul Delevoye, Ministre de la Fonction Publique, de la réforme de l’État et de l’aménagement du territoire de 2002 à 2004 et actuellement Président du Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental (CESE). Il s'agit d'une intervention lors des Assises du Numérique 2012. Cela remonte un peu mais les thèmes restent d'actualité et je partage de nombreux points qui y sont abordés.  

Sa biographie

"Le pouvoir de la communication transparente" par Meg Whitman

Comment mieux interagir avec vos employés quand l'entreprise bat de l'aile ? Meg Whitman, PDG de HP, dévoile les procédés employés par la direction dans le cadre de la restructuration de l'entreprise.

Texte original de Meg Whitman

Dans l’une de mes premières publications, j’ai défini un certain nombre de principes de leadership qui sont essentiels à la bonne restructuration d’une entreprise. Dans le cadre de mon partage d’idées et de mises à jour concernant la restructuration de HP, l’un des sujets que je souhaite tout particulièrement approfondir est l’importance de pratiquer une communication ouverte et transparente.

Meg Whitman, CEO HP

Une piètre communication ne nuit pas seulement à la collaboration et à l’exécution des tâches au sein de l’entreprise, mais elle s’exprime aussi invariablement à l’extérieur de la société, à travers les ventes, le service client ou la relation de l’organisation avec ses partenaires.

Améliorer notre façon de communiquer et de travailler ensemble dans l’entreprise a été l’une de mes priorités depuis le jour de mon arrivée chez HP. Les idées qui vont suivre correspondent à quelques-uns des changements auxquels nous avons aspiré pour toute l’entreprise. Elles peuvent s’appliquer à n’importe quelle entreprise en activité.

Sachez commencer petit

Lorsque je suis arrivée chez HP, je me suis retrouvée face à une entreprise divisée en silos.
Ces divisions cloisonnaient les salariés en fonction des caractéristiques géographiques et des différentes branches, mais elles constituaient souvent une séparation très marquée entre la direction et les employés.

Rien ne symbolisait davantage cette séparation que les bureaux des postes exécutifs et ce que j’appelais la « barrière commando », une clôture imposante en barbelés qui entourait le parking réservé à la direction. Les bureaux fermés et cette barrière au style militaire représentait très justement à quel point HP s’était écartée de la culture insufflée par les fondateurs de l’entreprise.

L’une de mes premières actions a été de détruire la clôture et d’installer tous les postes exécutifs dans des bureaux à cloisons. Nous rentrons maintenant tous par la même porte que les employés.

Cela constituait un premier symbole de la culture que nous souhaitions bâtir. Et dans des organisations aussi grandes que la nôtre, le symbolisme joue un rôle très important. Ce que vous exprimez à travers vos actions, des choses qui sont visibles par 320 000 personnes, font véritablement la différence.

Communiquez le problème, mais concentrez-vous sur les solutions

Alors que notre plan de restructuration de HP progresse à grands pas, on ne peut nier que l’entreprise refait surface après plusieurs années éprouvantes. Depuis que j’ai rejoint HP, nous avons mis un point d’honneur à aborder ce sujet de manière franche et directe avec nos clients, nos employés, nos investisseurs et nos partenaires. Cela implique de diagnostiquer les problèmes, mais plus particulièrement, de prévoir clairement la manière dont nous allons arranger les choses.

Un exemple récent : la Global Partner Conference de HP. Avec plus de 100 000 partenaires dans le monde entier, notre réseau est essentiel au succès de l’entreprise. Afin de réaffirmer notre engagement envers nos partenaires après une période d’incertitude, nous avons été sincères et avons reconnu qu’ils avaient dû faire face à de nombreux défis.
Mais nous nous sommes surtout concentrés sur ce que nos partenaires avaient envie d’entendre, à savoir des projets concrets visant à assurer notre succès mutuel à l’avenir.

Responsabilisez votre personnel

Vous pouvez améliorer l’infrastructure de votre entreprise et initier de multiples projets en provenance de la direction, mais vous ne ferez pas de progrès à moins de gagner le cœur et l’esprit de vos employés. Il est capital que ceux-ci s’identifient au projet et qu’on leur donne les moyens de provoquer le changement sur le terrain.

Chez HP, nous cherchons à impliquer et responsabiliser au maximum notre personnel dans le monde entier. Par exemple, en février dernier, pour la première fois, nous avons organisé une rencontre en personne entre tous les vices présidents et country managers de l’entreprise (1 100 personnes au total). Nous avons insisté sur leurs rôles de leaders, notre stratégie et les initiatives clé à appliquer dans l’ensemble de l’entreprise. Nous avons créé un environnement où il était possible de parler de questions épineuses et de collaborer afin de trouver des solutions pour les résoudre.

Il est essentiel de ne pas reculer devant les questions difficiles et de favoriser la communication à tous les niveaux de l’entreprise pour faire en sorte d’appliquer notre stratégie et de fonctionner comme une entreprise unie.

Une transparence cohérente

De nos jours, si une entreprise veut réussir, elle s’assurer que toutes les parties prenantes de l’organisation – employés, clients, investisseurs – perçoivent très clairement la stratégie et les résultats de l’entreprise, qu’ils soient bons ou mauvais.

Dans cette optique, nous avons recours à une approche plus proactive que ce qui a été fait par le passé chez HP en termes de communication externe. Cela inclut une nouvelle plateforme en ligne, HP Next, que nous avons lancée très récemment en tant que page d’accueil  pour toutes les mises à jour concernant la restructuration de HP. Nous utilisons d’ores et déjà ce site pour communiquer d’importantes mises à jour concernant l’entreprise, comme par exemple le futur directeur de notre conseil d’administration.

Tous les changements cités ci-dessus peuvent aider une entreprise à renforcer sa culture et ses relations avec toutes les parties prenantes, mais mon conseil aux autres dirigeants d’entreprise est le suivant : l’amélioration de la communication, tout bien considérée, dépend de l’implication et du respect des engagements de la part des employés à tous les niveaux de l’entreprise. C’est ce que j’essaye de renforcer chaque jour au sein de mon équipe. Je leur demande de se promener dans les bureaux et de rendre visite à leurs employés.

Allez directement parler à vos équipes plutôt que de leur envoyer des e-mails. Si vous montrez aux gens que vous êtes conscient des défis, des problèmes et que vous vous en occupez activement, cela fera la différence. Au bout du compte, améliorer la communication au sein de l’entreprise est un processus continu qui dépend de l’action individuelle de chacun : de nouveaux outils et initiatives ne vous mèneront pas bien loin.

Traduction par Joséphine Dennery, JDN.

 

Lien Journal du Net

 

A speech delivered by Steve Jobs in 2005 at Stanford University ... a lesson for everyone !

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Le charisme ... un des éléments clés du leadership !

Ce billet, un peu plus personnel, me permet de souligner ce qu'intuitivement nous savons tous : la personnalité, le charisme, la séduction, sont des éléments déterminants pour mobiliser et créer un mouvement fédérateur autour de soi. Serge Gainsbourg est emblématique à cet égard. Au départ, rien ne prédispose cet homme à attirer l'attention. Son physique ne plaide pas en sa faveur. Et pourtant, beaucoup le trouvent aujourd'hui séduisant. La talent change notre vision des choses. Un homme, une femme, c'est un tout. Un corps, une voix, des attitudes, un sourire, une somme de talents, ... Gainsbourg était séduisant, il savait capter l'attention des autres et vous entraîner dans son monde, le sien. Vous n'étiez pas obligé d'y pénétrer, mais une fois la porte franchie ... Personne ne peut dire s'il fut heureux. Certes, il a tenu dans ses bras les plus belles femmes, il a connu tous les succès, mais il a aussi sans doute beaucoup souffert. 

Sentimentalement, sa vie a connu des hauts, mais aussi des bas. J'ai été, comme beaucoup, voir le film relatant sa vie, "Vie héroïque". En visionnant le cours de son existence, cet enchainement de passions et de succès, on se dit qu'il a eu une vie extraordinaire. L'histoire est effectivement éblouissante, il a construit sa vie comme un roman, mais difficile de savoir si elle fut agréable pour lui. Dans tous les cas, il voulait le succès, il l'a eu. Dans tous les cas, Gainsbourg a su faire ce que font tous les leaders: se construire un monde, un environnement spécifique, ... Gainsbourg et Gainsbarre. Les deux facettes se complètent et intriguent à la fois. Gainsbourg, ce n'est pas seulement un artiste, c'est aussi un mode de vie, une façon de pensée, un homme que l'on déteste ou qui fascine, un homme que l'on a envie de suivre n'importe où ou que l'on rejette en bloc. 

Mais n'est-ce pas là le propre d'un leader que de créer des réactions de ce type! Et force est de constater qu'au moment où nous célébrons un peu partout les 20 ans de sa disparition, l'homme ne laisse pas indifférent.