Pascal Latouche - Open Innovation

When you’re at the top of the class, when you’re always first, when the vast majority of your classmates are struggling to understand what the teachers are saying, it’s sometimes hard for you to make friends. It was with great spontaneity that Cindy told me that she had few friends at the time and that bothered her greatly.

“ I went from one extreme to the other, … so I had lower grades, but I had friends .” Her solution was therefore to step back from her studies, or even make no effort at all, in short, to do everything that could undermine her first position. “ I was a dunce, but at least I had friends. ” She succeeded rather well if I believe the not very linear, even somewhat surprising, student journey.

Faced with her potential, I would have expected to be face to face with a Cindy telling me that she had done a preparatory class, then followed a grande école in France, etc. I’m not saying that these schools are intended for high potential, just that the one who is high potential, probably has more ability to integrate in these schools even if they are somewhat conditioned a priori . I expected to hear her tell me she’d gone for the hard sciences…. Nothing of the sort.

I admit I had a hard time mapping Cindy’s student life. The grandes écoles1 were not an option because she could not afford them. I perceived in Cindy’s words a constraint that she gave herself: “ I had to have a BAC +52, because that’s how it works in France ”. Cindy was also wondering at that time what to do as a job that allowed her to work little and earn a lot, knowing that the education system forced her to choose between literature and science, and that she had capabilities in both fields. She finally wanted to become a conference interpreter because of her talent for languages: “ I had seen that you could work a few days a year and earn a lot! ”. To say the least, her journey has been rich.

See for yourself. So in summary: Cindy has two “BAC +2 3” degrees: one in Applied Foreign Languages from a “ lousy college ” and one in web development; a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Foreign Languages; a master’s degree in English/Italian legal and financial translation; an anglo-american masterer’s degree in Economy and a master’s degree in International Marketing/Business from evening classes.

Impressive, isn’t it? Well, Cindy’s not done with her study story because she’d like to go back to college for fun as soon as she can find some time. This is part of her personal goals, such as speaking the seven languages defined when she was 18 years old…. Being high potential offers a huge choice….

After 40 minutes of interviewing, I wanted to dig a bit deeper with Cindy. I asked her if she saw herself as a “learning machine”, “a computer”. Everything about her was reminiscent of someone who was optimizing everything she was going through to save time, especially since she told me she felt like she was working a bit like a GPS: “ when something goes wrong, a bit like a GPS, I recalculate the route ”. She goes to the essentials and all non-useful information is zapped in order to move forward. “ I feel like I always want to optimize everything in my life. ” It’s as if she’s running towards a final goal, a result she’s already set, gradually optimizing the vagaries of life to actually feed that goal. Cindy was not shocked by the question and the wording, which she felt was true enough.

I’ve rarely heard anyone tell me about so many professional experiences in so few years. “ You can make a resume say whatever you want ”. In about seven years, Cindy has had eight jobs in very different companies (start-ups, SMEs IT services companies, French and foreign), and at the same time, she was, for fun, a mystery …: “ I’ve seen a lot of countries LOL ”.

Each of these experiences was aimed at understanding her professional environment, “eating” knowledge, and acquiring “know-how”. She liked some of the jobs. Some she didn’t. The bottom line: “ Even when I had a perfect atmosphere around me, it wasn’t enough to be happy at work ”. The salaried employment definitely didn’t suit her. When you move from job to job, and you experience those positions as means, there are no failures or successes. You learn from every situation. That’s the feeling I get from her journey as an employee. Never any real disappointment, just better understanding by doing, the field of possibilities.

Of course she told me, she tried her hand at learning code and she didn’t like it. It’s that the teacher had a teaching method that was just inadequate. Indeed, the latter was obviously making his students work on the code without telling them what the purpose was. No wonder some kind of spirit like Cindy’s couldn’t get to grips with it. Cindy “works” to the rationally thought-out goal of being good for her. This has helped her to improve project management and gain efficiency with developers and she knows how to make simple small websites. Not bad!

During all the years she worked and earned a salary, Cindy says she went from the best to the worst. “ Starting in a start-up and ending up in a big company is very complicated … it’s like going from efficient to … politically correct and slow .” Along the way, a passion for digital marketing emerged. This was not very well developed in some companies.

All these experiences of paid work, of “ prison ” , were finally summed up very well by Cindy: “ I took everything there was to take with the goal, one day, of launching my business ”. And it was with a strong value component, attention to others and above all remaining accessible, that she launched herself into entrepreneurship very early on.

Her first “solo” entrepreneurial experience was when she was still a student. It is with professional precision that Cindy explained to me in detail the reasons for the failure of this first experience. Such hindsight is quite rare; believe my modest experience with entrepreneurs.

A few years later, a digital marketing agency was forged at a time when the only thing that interested the prospect was setting up websites. Nothing very exciting for Cindy who wanted to go much further: to train people in digital marketing, to make them understand the subtleties and potentialities that it offers.

No doubt this was what she wanted to do and launched Naïas, an extension of her digital marketing agency, initially as a subcontractor. By getting personally involved as a trainer, she took the bull by the horns and built up a real network of trainers in the digital field. I say network and it’s a word chosen when we know that Cindy lived in Amsterdam, while having training centers in many cities in France.

Why Amsterdam? It seems that Cindy was looking for some kind of peace and quiet at this point in her life to run her business. “ Paris is nice, but frankly where I lived, every five minutes I would run into people I knew from work. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I decided to run my business from elsewhere ”.

Naïas spread its wings. Was that the objective? After all, Naïas was doing well, Cindy was the main shareholder, there were more demands than there was capacity to meet them. Cindy and Naïas mastered the mysteries of training laws extremely well. So what else?