TESTIMONY
excellence:
Exemplary, Requirement,
Inspirational, Impact
Bruno, Partner,
Mines Paris Tech
But to the question: what does excellence mean to you? », the answers are much less homogeneous.
Requirement
Above all, excellence does not seem to me to be an essence but a continuous search. Our methods and skills are constantly evolving to support our clients in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. I would therefore represent excellence as a path and not as a state, a process of permanent questioning which, like the fable of Achilles and the tortoise, brings us ever closer to a target that cannot be reached. Excellence is therefore above all a requirement at all times, without compromise, in maximizing the added value that we bring to our customers, and learning at each experience of everything that we could implement to support them further. again. At Kea, I was able to discover tools such as cultural diagnosis of a company, and work on the development of new approaches such as the strategic dialogue, which concretely allow me to give new points of view to my clients and to open unexplored playgrounds to them.
Exemplary
Consulting seems to me, more than any other profession, an activity requiring the individual to blend into the team. Our clients choose an approach, an energy, a style, which can only exist when they are embodied by all those involved in the project, from the youngest to the most experienced.
As a project manager, I must therefore consider excellence in three dimensions : my own service to my client who must be able to serve as an exemplary model for my team members, that of the consultants I supervise, finally the overall service provided by the Kea team. Excellence seems to me to have to be the search for the perfection of a team, in a logic of exemplarity, solidarity and companionship between all its members.
Whatever your own vision of excellence, it seems fundamental to me that it be a source of energy and desire for you to always cross the boundaries of known terrain, and above all not an object of pressure and frustration. Wanting to achieve excellence in every way, besides being an extremely academic aspiration, is illusory, fortunately ! In Rameau's Le Neveu, did not Diderot say : “If everything here below was excellent, there would be nothing excellent. »
In my eyes, excellence only exists through the perception that the sponsor of our mission will have of it.
When I ask students, during recruitment interviews or forums, what interests them, motivates them in strategy and management consulting, one expression comes up repeatedly: " school of excellence ".
Many of us therefore choose this profession in search of the Holy Grail of professional excellence, a source of intellectual satisfaction and pride in belonging to a certain form of eminence.
" The ability to make the best recommendations to a client » offers one, " the ability to consistently meet and exceed project sponsor expectations » venture for a second, " the fact of delivering a result that is systematically irreproachable » scholarly asserts a third that his American colleague will translate into a pragmatic " being flawless », " the talent » will be content to retort another interviewee to distinguish himself by his incisive spirit.
I find each of these answers quite relevant, undoubtedly piecemeal, but above all eminently personal. I encourage each visitor to this page to ask themselves this same question and to try to answer it in all sincerity, by accepting – no, by claiming ! – the subjectivity of its definition : What is excellence for me ? Undoubtedly guided by my experience of more than ten years in consulting, I lent myself to this exercise which led me to define excellence through four words who, I hope, will offer an interview of the practice of the consulting profession at Kea&Partners.
Inspiration
How to define the boundaries of our profession, when our interventions can cover realities ranging from the design of a corporate vision to the maximization of the performance of a sales team in store, through the redefinition of an organization marketing or designing a new product or service offering ? An approach of excellence as a consultant therefore seems to me to necessarily have to go through a strong openness to the outside, the ability to feed on skills that we do not have, to be curious about what we do not master and to seek inspiration in all contacts, so numerous and diverse that our profession generates. I would never have thought of one day facilitating a working session of a management committee using Lego bricks, yet it can be a powerful tool for building the vision of the company that I discovered with our Swedish partner!
Impact
Finally, I will return to the etymological meaning of the word excellence. Excellence is an old borrowing, dating back to the twelfth century, from the Latin excellens, -entis "eminent, of superior value", present participle of excel to surpass, to be superior”. To excel therefore means to reach a level of quality or of meritorious, summit value. Who else but our customers can be the judges? In my eyes, excellence only exists through the perception that the sponsor of our mission will have of it. The excellence of a consultant must therefore be considered not according to the models he designs or the organizational diagrams he draws, but rather in view of the impact he manages to generate for his client, its ability to create a positive and lasting dynamic, beneficial to the company and its employees, generating cohesion and pride.