[MUSIC] Resilience is the third step of the Savoir Relier Protocol and a key component of leadership, as we saw in our previous MOOC. It is a skill you have developed with the Savoir Relier Protocol, remember? When speaking of resilience, I always have in mind the story of Apollonia who took over the family business after the tragic event she had to go through at the age of 18, losing her two parents in a helicopter accident. Who can better speak of resilience than Apollonia? Well, here she is, talking to you now. >> When I was 18 years old, I finished up my apprenticeship as a baker. Unfortunately, my parents passed away in an accident, late October 2002. At that point, when I learned of their accident, it was obvious to me that I was to take over the family business. But come to think about, I was 18 years old, yes, I had experience in baking and also, experience in understanding the specifics of my family business. But I was also inexperienced in terms of leading a business. I was only 18 years old and I had the perspective of going to college a year after that. Making sense of all of those elements and also, the very, very fortunate circumstances of having grown up in the family business, it made all the more sense for me to follow my instinct and take over the family business. I worked with my parents' teams and I managed to make that succession a success. >> Thank you, Apollonia. Your experience, I'm sure, will inspire our learners and give them greater willpower to grow their own resilience. Have you identified how the relational circuit applies to Apollonia's situation? Can you identify the five steps? We're now going to see how resilience applies to other companies, starting with Coursera. Daphne will start by sharing how Coursera is building resilience, learning from success as from failures, with one example >> One of the biggest challenges when we started Coursera was going to our potential university partners. Often they were the best universities, they had been doing this business in largely the same way for hundreds of years. And convince them to do something that was very different and in many ways counter to how they'd been operating. They needed to open up what lay at the core of their being. Their faculty, their content, their brand and make that available to millions of people worldwide. All for the promise of transforming society but in ways that had not really been proven before. These conversations were, at the beginning, somewhat challenging. How do you convince someone to completely change the way they think about offering education? The universities that were the first to join, I think, were particularly forward-thinking and courageous in being willing to take that step and lead the way to what is turning into a major transformation in higher education. >> And now, Stephane Richard, can you share with us a moment that has been particularly difficult in your leadership at Orange? >> I would probably mention, once again, the arrival of a new payer in the French market. We make more than 50% of our revenues in France, which it's our home country, so even though we are an international company, it's very important. And it was a major change in the French environment with after 15 years of debate, the arrival of a new player in our market. This provoked a lot of disruption in the market, in the consumer or so expectations regarding the operators. It was really a very tough, tough moment. It's the kind of event that can totally bring huge consequences on incumbents, on existing operators, if you are not able to anticipate this. And maybe also to change the way of seeing certain issues. For instance, the brand, we have a brand, Orange, which is a very nice asset. We are very proud of our brand but when the new entrants arrived, the question was, do we have to launch a new brand? A brand that could compete directly with the new player. Once again, it was really something totally new, we decided to do it, and the fact that we have been able, all together, with like a work organization. We had crisis meeting all the time to see how the market reacted. I think we, clearly, well anticipated, this shock in the market. We well anticipated also the way in terms of marketing and our own organization, we reacted and we responded to this. I think that after three or four years we are stronger now. This is maybe the best proof that we are resilient because when you have someone in such a market, closed market, which arrives by cutting prices by two, we had to in fact deal with a 45% decrease in the average price of what we sell. So it's an incredible shock. Being stronger four years after, I think is really the sign that we are very, very resilient. In my view, we have been able to reach this because of the strength and the commitment of the teams well before the event, so anticipation. And probably for a large organization, as we are, I think we have been also very quick to react. Probably, much quicker than the environment was expected. >> Thank you Stefane and yes, indeed, the role of the leader is key in giving people the confidence and energy to act in difficult situations and to stay together because of shared values and trust. Your reliance certainly proved effective as you showed being back and strong in the telecom industry only four years after the fight started and that is a case in point. Now let's turn to another telling example. This one also in crisis, facing a failure, the failure of the merger between Publicus and Omnicom. As a 3G leader with the openness that only Savoir Relier leaders have, Maurice Levy, can you tell us in a few words what happened? >> Telling the story of a failed merger is first painful and second, requires a lot of time but I will try to give you the short version. We wanted to merge with Omnicom based on a merger of equals. A merger of equals has not yet been proven to be working. Therefore, we invented a model with a few steps to be achieved before the merger in order to make sure that we are in a true merger of equals. The reality that we found out pretty quickly that we were going in two different directions. And rather than doing something which is not working, we have decided to take the hit and the blame and to refuse a merger, which would not have been good for our people, for our client, and for the future of our company, our values. All this has been painful, difficult, and I must say extremely courageous from our board. >> I understand that values were a driving force in your decision and that courage was indeed part of what it took to be resilient in the face of this failure to carry out the goal to merge with Omnicom. Courage to recognize the mistake and courage to take action and maintain your decision to stop the merger when many financial analysts were pursuing you to go ahead with it. >> Financial analysts consider that it was good for shareholder value and that was true for the short term. The reality is that, again, based on the first G, genuine, we think that this would have been terribly unauthentic merger because it would have destroyed our values, and at the end of the day, the value for the shareholders. >> So here, Maurice Levy] is thinking long-term sustainability, rather than short-term profits that too often drive decisions in companies, as in life. We will turn to this key point of tension, short-term versus long-term, that affects our lives so much. Indeed, we tend to want things right away at the expense of more difficult, yet more sustainable and more rewarding path. I will leave you with the poem of an American poet, Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, that concludes with these lines. Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Can you think about this and how it applies to your own life? Write in your thoughts in your SR journal.
