Our ambition is to help our clients develop into skilled, purposeful, balanced leaders. The investment is immense and it is critical that they can stay the distance. Modern business leaders continually travel, often eating the wrong things at the wrong time and generally accumulating a sleep deficit. They drive themselves hard, drawing on outstanding mental and physical stamina. This comes at an unaffordable cost to the individual, family and business.

Our new expert, John Dent, has a vital role to play in ensuring clients are fit to lead. Debunking macho myths about becoming a buff, mean, lean fighting machine, he brings science to the leadership demands of playing the long game and works with individuals and teams to balance seemingly conflicting demands on time and attention. Like all WWS experts, John uses evidence-based tools and approaches to generate results quickly.

After completing a sporting degree at Loughborough, John followed his natural inclination to play professional rugby and joined Racing Club in Paris but quit after two years: “I was too small! Although I am 5’11’’ and weighed in at a toned 17.5 stones, I was much smaller than most on the pitch and decided I wanted a life outside rugby.” He returned to London in 1995 to set up his company Fresh Health and worked with sports stars who wanted to get back to fitness after back surgery, as well as executives wanting to change their lifestyle and fitness levels.

John keeps adding to his knowledge of fitness and balance: he is a member of the CHEK institute, a body of elite sports coaches from California as well as a teacher of Body Control Pilates. “I never thought as a rugby player I’d end up a Pilates specialist – it’s more usually associated with ballet! But Pilates is great for strengthening backs.” He is also a certified Golf Biomechanic – which means that he helps with both golf-specific fitness and the healing of related injuries.

So what makes John special? First he understands human nature: "booze, coffee and excess are all part of corporate life, so you have to look at the individual physically, chemically and emotionally. It is not useful to blame people who are exhausted, stressed or simply have no understanding of what healthy behaviour looks like. I try to give people strategies to improve their health that are not always about exercise routines. For example if somebody over-uses their fight or flight nervous system and have poor sleep patterns, it is important to equip them with new routines that will steady them and increase sleep before they can start getting fit.”

John's clients report that he has an uncanny ability to make you discover muscle groups you never knew existed, while keeping you enthused and goal oriented. It's easy to see why both stars and City types want to work with him: he lets you have your cake and eat it, as long as you put the energy to good use!

When Jean-Christophe Bédos was head-hunted from his high flying job at Cartier to turn around jewellers to the royalty and stars, Boucheron, he thought: “it’s time to jump from the flight simulator to the real thing!” and quite a ride it has been… White Water Strategies has worked with Jean-Christophe and his team from day one and was fortunate both to participate in and observe strategy in real time.

There is still a lot to do, but the Gucci Group-owned business has declared profits a year ahead of schedule, recruitment has resumed and a dozen new stores have opened in the last two years, from Shanghai to Dubai, underpinned by a relaunch of all collections and the refit of the flagship store on Place Vendôme.

Boucheron, 150 years old next year, is a multinational luxury goods business based in Paris with a strong weighting to the French and Japanese markets. Its main craft is high-end jewellery and watches, but it is also famous for its perfumes and accessories. The Gucci Group acquired the family-owned business in 2000 and was not immediately successful in applying its fashion management methods to what is a very different business. Jean-Christophe recalls what happened when he joined in 2004 as the third CEO in five years…

“This was my first full P&L role and the L was certainly bigger that the P! So where do you start in a real-life case study? The best thing for me was that I was supported by the group board to take enough time to think and analyse before declaring my strategy, although we were in the middle of a financial crisis.” He continues: “I was also grateful to have a senior coach working with me from day one to help analyse situations objectively and prioritise actions.”

The next 18 months were a whirlwind of activity from drastic cost-cutting to rebuilding the business on its core values of creativity, design and high-end quality. “I am not a turnaround artist, I am a business builder,” muses Jean-Christophe “so restoring top line growth was an absolute priority but you had to cut spend at the same time… a very interesting juggling act in an industry were sales are driven by marketing investment.”

Reflecting on lessons for aspiring leaders he offers: “There are things I could have done better – some roles should have been eliminated, but there are people who are popular or who are costly to move on. Procrastination just doesn’t work.” He learned that by far the best business advice is: “You really have only 100 days to formulate your strategy and take key decisions.”

Jean-Christophe’s personal challenges included switching from a predictable business (Cartier) to a chaotic and entrepreneurial one (a definite plus!), managing his perceived functional blind spots and his own confidence, trusting the team and coping with the pressure to show results quickly. “My experience proved to me that it’s important to be yourself; don’t try and paper over weaknesses: acknowledge them and build the right team to support you. I also should have adopted the right plaster removal approach – if it’s going to hurt, do it quickly!”

CV:

• Education: Lycée Fermat (Toulouse); Sorbonne Universty (Paris) – Master’s in Management and Law; Sloan MBA (London Business School)
• Career: joined Cartier in 1988. Various positions included Marketing Director of Cartier UK and adviser to the CEO of Richemont International. General Manager of Cartier France 2002-04. President and CEO of Boucheron since 2004.
• Jean-Christophe is also the founder and president of the French chapter of the Laureus Foundation, a global charity that uses the positive influence of sport to support projects around the globe.
  

Favourites:

• Favourite self-help book: The daily Drucker. 366 days of insight and motivation for getting the right things done.
• Favourite Film: The Graduate, because I met my wife thanks to this film.
• Favourite sportman and woman: Steve Redgrave, Edwin Moses for their ability to remain at the top for so many years. Stefie Graff for the same reason.
• Last CD bought: the EMI historical recording of Don Giovanni. I have a passion for opera.
• Favourite time of the year: Christmas with my wife and our four children.
  

Great links:

• Boucheron store re-opening gala night (fashion TV)
• Fondation Laureus

Our guest ‘opinionated person’ this quarter is Paul Oliver, head of Oxford-based strategy boutique Conduco Consulting.

In the words of the song, "everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you". Never was this more so than with teams in business and government. Why is it that following yet another stormy reorganisation, everybody ends up feeling like it’s a wet Wednesday in March? It’s because reshuffles are frequently ill-conceived, and focus only on the politics of the formal organisation. When I speak to the ‘armchair Generals’ who are the architects of theses reorganisations, I often hear complaints about resistance to change. My advice: watch and learn how resistance happens!

So-called teams on wall charts take months to get things wrong, but there are other types: informal teams that actually get things done. People collaborating together behave like weather systems: they are complex and unpredictable. They self-organise. If the relationship between any two team members at any given time can switch between four states – good, bad, so-so and don’t know – then the simplest team of three can operate in 4,096 moods! Add a single new team member and the permutations rise to over 68 billion; no wonder small changes to teams can be disruptive. And this is why predicting organisational behaviour is even harder than predicting the weather. Hence my first law: “If you can’t predict it, you can’t control it…"

So why do organisations spend so much effort controlling the uncontrollable? Most design efforts to formalise team behaviour get thwarted by a dysfunctional and informal response: the water cooler effect. In other words, behaving like a complex adaptive system, like the corporate equivalent of the immune system resisting a virus, only it’s REORG101 not H5N1!

Self-organising teams always collaborate, sometimes as a force for good, like the best project teams, sports teams and even those working on large successful campaigns like Live Aid. But self-organisation can sometimes be used as a malevolent force, like a low pressure system that sucks the energy out of an organisation, occasionally leading to self-destruction (e.g. Enron and MCI-WorldCom). So understanding the direction of informal teams is as important as identifying them.

Throw away your organisation charts and use self-organising teams as a force for good. Here are my top tips to engage teams into self-organisation and create half a chance to get the right things done:

• Focus on and reinforce shared purpose, beliefs and values
• Engage people in their informal rather than formal groups
• Engage them through the heart as well as the head
• Create compelling stories that can be adopted, adapted and retold to both educate and entertain
• Help the team shape their own agenda
• Use ‘learning leadership’ to help the team to learn how to win together
• Gain commitment – don’t try to force compliance

This piece is part of forthcoming research that will be published in April at www.conduco-consulting.com