Previous Occupation: Business Intelligence Manager, Business & Decision        
Consulting, Paris
Present Occupation: Senior Manager, Management Consulting, KPMG Hong Kong
Sector: Financial Services and Luxury Goods
Work Experience: 13 years in consulting
Interests – Professional/ Personal

I’m passionate about discovering innovative applications analysing customer digital behaviours using big data and analytics solutions. I’m also an accomplished musician - I play the tabla - and participate every year in multiple tours and concerts across Asia. On weekends, I also enjoy swimming (Hong Kong has some nice beaches) and playing football/ badminton with my son and friends.

Can you tell us a little about your family background/ history? 
I come from Brittany, a wild region in the west of France. I’ve inherited from those roots a taste for travelling and discovering new horizons, the love of good food and good music and a tendency to cherish quality time spent with friends and family. 

Briefly describe your personal and professional achievements (including recent awards/ special projects).
Three days after graduation, I joined AXA Asia, a global insurance company. I’ve successfully led the implementation of an exhaustive Business Intelligence solution across eight countries with a focus on customer data management. The solution, including a Single View of Customer mechanism, a Data Quality dashboard and Data Analytics solutions enabled the organisation to better understand their customers across the region and capture multiple customer insights. This project was a real challenge as I had to manage expectations of c-suite executives and end users across eight countries with different levels of business maturity and also manage the implementation team and vendors in three different locations. We succeeded in executing the regional rollout in less than 18 months. Today, this solution is the foundation of the company’s three-year business and IT strategy plan. The management skills as well as the strategic vision I successfully shared with key business stakeholders were the main reasons why I was headhunted by KPMG a few days after the successful rollout.  

Tell us about your profile pre-ISB, and recap your professional life after ISB, including your career progression.
I joined ISB after 10 years of consulting across Europe. I was one of the youngest managers in my company and felt that I needed to acquire more business insights, concepts and frameworks in order to rise to the next level. As I was looking to move to Asia and was already initiated into Indian culture, ISB was a natural choice. Following my graduation, I had a great experience where I could put into practice key PGP learnings, managing a strategic project for two years for AXA Asia before joining KPMG Hong Kong last June. I have now moved much closer to the business, as in parallel with strategic engagements, I lead the service client team for our major Asian insurance client and I also develop the key service value propositions for insurance across the region.

Describe your fondest memory at ISB.
Many good memories come to mind when I reflect back on my year at the ISB campus. However, my fondest memory was the Bandhan event on Republic Day spent with over 300 children from various NGOs. This day concluded beautifully with their amazing cultural show. We also had the opportunity to sing a qawwali for them. It gave us great joy to see all those bright faces and it was also a very humbling experience. 

In your personal life, how have you changed post-ISB? Do you see yourself doing something differently because you went to ISB? What has left a lasting impression?
Through my ISB experience, I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my capacity to deal with complex situations and to deal with different cultures and people. I didn't have to wait long to find this out as the first weeks after graduation were the hardest of my life. I had to deal with moving to a new country and culture, new job responsibilities, leading a strategic project across eight countries, and supporting my family as they adjusted to a new lifestyle. Overall, I would say my ISB experience helped me to clarify my career and personal goals and gave me access to knowledge and skills that I can leverage to solve my day to day challenges.

How do you think ISB has contributed to your career growth?
I took many different kinds of courses at ISB as I wanted to take advantage of every opportunity to discover subjects I was not familiar with. This has helped me to identify the subject areas in which I wanted to perform and to focus my career objectives on those. As a management consulting manager, my marketing, strategy and leadership experience is enriched every day through direct contact with business executives. This ultimately enables me to bring value to my clients and position myself as a subject matter expert.

If you have to sum up ISB in one word?
Enriching 

What was the main highlight of your programme at the ISB?
I learned a lot working with my peers in study groups. You get to know a lot about others when you work together several nights in a row and finally deliver a good piece of work. Even after three years and living far away from India, I still have strong ties with my batch. I also enjoyed the Speaker Series, where we received many good insights on businesses in India and Asia. Finally, I find the activities of different clubs very enriching, and those helped me to maintain a balance in my life and share different perspectives with other students.

Word of advice for the current class?
I’ve learned more outside class than in class (don’t take me wrong - I did learn a lot in class). My advice is to spend quality time meeting others through club activities, going out to restaurants or sport events, taking the time to go and meet teachers outside the class and meeting businessmen around campus. Stay open-minded as you can learn anytime from anyone.

What was your favourite course/ class at ISB and why?
I loved all the soft skills and behavioural topics, and I’m still in contact with most of the professors. Knowing about people and customers is often the key to succeeding in any managerial role. I found the topic so vast and rich; it really helped me to gain perspective and also helped me to anticipate potential disruptive customer trends.  

Was there anyone during your time at ISB who acted as a mentor for you? Tell us a little about this relationship and why it was valuable. 
When looking to people who inspire me at ISB, the common trait is that they are intuitive and very people-oriented. I’ve particularly enjoyed discussions with Dean Ajit Rangnekar, Professor  Edwards, Professor Pinto, Professor Ravi and Professor Batra. I also gained many insights from discussions with alumni, especially during my project for Microsoft (another nice campus next door to ISB).

What are the areas in which you can contribute to ISB?
As the president of the international club, I tried to bring cultural awareness and diversity to the campus. We organized many social and business events and had cultural awareness sessions where foreign students could exchange notes about their countries, culture, business and social etiquette, dos and don’ts, etc. Since I graduated, I continue to be involved in the international student recruitment process and use every occasion to promote the ISB experience. I’d also like to support more alumni to establish their businesses in Hong Kong.

What do you enjoy most about your current career position?
What I like about my current position is that every day there is a new challenge to be solved and something to create and learn from it. It could be about managing people, supporting a client to innovate, building a strategic positioning, capturing threats and opportunities of potential disruptive trends or creating a new approach to solve old problems.

What is the next new thing in the industry or vertical you are working in? Any trends that you can see?
With the rise of digital customers and big data, more and more companies are worried that they are not ready to adapt their operations and services to the new ways customers want to interact with them. Indeed, this often means breaking down operating and governance silos, changing the style of decision making and enabling collaboration and innovation across the lines of business. Becoming customer-centric and data-driven is a necessity for companies to compete, but the deep transformations required are often underestimated and taken with the old IT delivery approach. Another problem is the lack of alignment of these initiatives with the company’s strategic objectives, which reduces the realised value and benefits.

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