Sunday, August 31, 2014

Leadership Lessons from Jean-Claude Biver, CEO Hublot

Jean-Claude Biver, CEO Hublot
- If the 21st century wants to survive, it must rediscover ‘love’.
– ‘Love’ gives meaning to life.
– Leadership is all about sharing and knowing how to share.
– Sharing knowledge, doubts, successes, even failures, is key to “what makes you rich.”
– People who don’t share are dangerous.
– Biver follows the adagio of Albert Einstein who said that creativity and innovation are more important than knowledge.
– A leader should show he has doubts. Because doubts allow us to rethink what we do.
– Failure is the motor of success.
– Each failure brings you closer to success.
– Respect for yourself and others is also key to success.
– Never mistreat your suppliers.
– Respect means promptly answering your emails, being constantly in a state of responsiveness.
– Hublot never gives watches for free to celebrities, because they cannot cherish what they have not chosen. They must buy it at full price, then they’ll love it.
– If you cannot forgive mistakes, you should not be the boss of a team.
– There are so many mistakes that can be made, so make as many as possible, as soon as possible, but never make them twice.
– When employing people, always look for failures in their CV, the more the better.
– “I will be the master of my cheese until the last piece.”
– “You measure your success by two elements: the numbers of fake copies and how many people are jealous of your industry.”
– Life has only one goal, to leave a trace.
– One should live to leave two traces. The trace of love and the trace in your occupation or business. The one who is able to leave a trace of love has lived a life that is 99 % successful. If one is able to leave a trace in his career or business or in whatever one did, life was a 100 % success.
– Always try to be first, be different and be unique.
– You only desire what you cannot get. People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.
– Keep the customer unsatisfied!
– SHARING. FORGIVING. RESPECTING. These are the three values that guide how Hublot conducts itself as a company.
– The world is not static and a brand has to constantly adapt its concepts, products and DNA to the changes.
– I always try to adapt and forget about my own culture. I never meet other people with an imperialist or colonialist approach where you have the feeling that the others have to understand and adapt your own culture.
– I learned that you have to be open minded, that you have to be prepared to share, to listen, to learn, to understand and finally to respect. That is the only way for me to integrate yourself in our world. It is even more than that: it’s the rule of planet earth; and whoever cannot understand and follow this rule is condemned to fail.

More on Jean-Claude Biver, go to www.fli.institute