INDUSTRIALIST HONED BY FRENCH POLISH

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 619.

Like most of France's technocratic elite, Pierre Bilger is a Europhile and sees Alstom, the Anglo-French group he chairs, as an experiment in European unity

Few people better personify the French technocratic elite that has held France in a tight grip for many decades than Pierre Bilger. Bilger is the Chairman of Alstom, the giant power and railway equipment company formed out of the joint venture between Britain's General Electric Company (GBC) and France's Alcatel-Alsthom, which became a separately quoted company in 1998.

In his long career, Bilger has is moved effortlessly from government to big business with the ease that the French state seems to encourage. He was born in 1940, in the Alsace region of eastern France. After school, he attended first the Institut des Etudes Politiques, then the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the elite finishing school for French technocrats and many future government leaders.

On graduating, Bilger, like many of his ENA colleagues, joined the Finance Ministry, rising quickly up its ranks. In 1982 he switched from government to industry, joining CGE, as Alcatel-Alsthom was then known, although since the company was at that time owned by the French state, the change was more apparent than real.

At Alcatel-Alsthom his big project was overseeing the formation in 1988 of the joint venture with GEC. As soon as the joint venture, GEC-Alsthom, was formed, Bilger was given the task of running it.

After a decade of working for one of the largest Anglo-French joint ventures, Bilger is well attuned to Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He speaks frequently of shareholders and of the need to keep costs down but he still remains very French. His explanations are fluent and polished and his arguments have none of the down-to-earth style you might expect from someone running a British engineering company.

Although Britain and France are neighbours, their business cultures could hardly be further apart. What, I ask, had he found most irritating about the English once he was put in charge of a company full of them? “What I found most irritating about our British colleagues was their great reluctance to go through what we French would consider a rational process of making a decision,” he answered thoughtfully. “They insist on going straight to the point, whereas we like to have a systematic agenda. But over time I came to appreciate that this had its virtues as well.”

Like most French establishment figures, Bilger is an ardent Europhile. The company, he believes, is itself an experiment in unity; soon after the British and French parts were put together, German and Spanish units were added. After a brief attempt at using multiple languages inside the company, Bilger soon decided to impose English as the company language, partly because the English were reluctant to learn any other languages. “We lost a few French managers because of that, but not many,” he says.

Alstom remains a technological leader and it is led by bright people. Bilger does not mention it, but in France the country's cleverest, best-qualified people can be found running manufacturing companies. In Britain that has not been true for almost a century.

From The Sunday Times

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