From Corporate Leadership to Sustainability with Anne Langourieux S3 I Ep5

Join us on the Career Transitions podcast as we delve into the inspiring journey of Anne Langourieux, a seasoned leader who transitioned from a successful corporate career to becoming a catalyst for sustainability.

 In this episode, Anne shares her story of navigating career transitions, from her early days in multinational corporations to founding the Matcha Initiative, a nonprofit organization focused on accelerating sustainability in Singapore.

 Hosted by Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo in collaboration with ESSEC Business School, this episode explores the pivotal moments and insights that shaped Anne's career trajectory. From her formative years at ESSEC to her experiences in diverse industries, Anne discusses the importance of purpose-driven leadership, building networks of mentors and peers, and finding fulfillment in making a positive impact.

 Tune in to gain valuable lessons and inspiration from Anne's journey of reinvention, as she emphasizes the significance of aligning passion with profession and empowering others to drive meaningful change in their own careers.

 Don't miss this enlightening conversation with Anne Langourieux, a true exemplar of purposeful leadership and sustainable innovation.

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Vanessa T: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the next episode of the Career Transitions podcast. The podcast where we explore what it takes to successfully navigate through career transitions, no matter which stage of life or career you're at. 

[00:00:18] Vanessa I: Welcome to our next episode of the Career Transition podcast and ESSEC Business School collaboration.

[00:00:24] This week, we are very excited to have Anne Langourieux, founding member and leader of the Matcha Initiative. 

[00:00:31] Vanessa T: In this episode, we look at other career paths shaped by ESSEC Business School. We were inspired by the purpose driven transition that Anne took to transform her career. 

[00:00:42] Vanessa I: She moved her career from a successful corporate leadership role to an entrepreneur and leader of a nonprofit organization focused on sustainability.

[00:00:50] Vanessa T: And I really enjoyed how we talked about the importance of dual career management, building your network of trusted mentors and peers, and finding purpose in what you do. We hope you enjoyed this episode and be inspired to start your journey of transformation.

[00:01:12] Vanessa I: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our new episode of the Career Transition Podcast. We are your hosts, Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo. Today on the Career Transition ESSEC collaboration episode, we speak with Anne Langorieux. Welcome to you, Anne. 

[00:01:27] Anne L: Hello. Thank you very much for having me today. I'm very happy to be here and talk about career transition and my own path.

[00:01:34] Vanessa T: Well, Anne, it's such a great pleasure having you on our show today. Let me just do a quick introduction. So Anne was born and raised in France and brings over 25 years of diverse experience spanning multiple industries and leadership roles. She has helped managerial positions in multinational corporations such as L'Oreal and Procter & Gamble, gaining expertise in marketing and strategic planning.

[00:01:58] And she's really driven by her passion for sustainability and making that social impact. 

[00:02:04] Vanessa I: Anne's career took a significant turn when she co founded the Matcha Initiative, a non profit company and a platform aimed at accelerating sustainability in Singapore. As a leader, Anne connects businesses with sustainable solutions, fostering collaboration and driving positive change.

[00:02:23] Vanessa T: I'm really curious, and since this is an ESSEC laboratory that we're in, for this season, we're very curious to understand your education journey and the fact that you chose to do a postgraduate education at ESSEC, if you could just share with us some of the factors that influenced your decision and how your experience has helped to shape your career trajectory.

[00:02:44] Anne L: I was born in France, but in a small island, a tropical island near Mauritius, Madagascar. I was an Icelander, like many Singaporeans. At 18 years old, I wanted to escape my island and see the world. I decided not to do my uni years in La Réunion. But go to Paris, which was a big move. I was good in math. I was good in physics, but I didn't want to be an engineer. I wanted to be a manager. 

[00:03:12] It was easy for me to choose a boarding school compared with normal uni. And this is how I ended up in preparatory school. And then it was the path you prepare for the exam. It's a competition. Depending on your ranks, you will be accepted in different schools. In ESSEC, at that time, we had some psychological tests.

[00:03:33] And we also had an interview. The interview in ESSEC was about our own journey, our desire, our values. And I loved that. And the jury was practitioners. They were teachers and professors, but they were really people like you and me. From day one I fell in love with that school and I decided then that it would be the school for me.

[00:03:55] Vanessa I: That's funny you're mentioning this interview Anne, because I remember mine very clearly. And I thought that it was really something very different actually for us compared to all the other schools we were competing for. And I agree with you, the fact that they paid attention to our dreams, our aspiration.

[00:04:13] We were wondering, you know, in which way you feel like the ESSEC program shaped you or shaped the beginning of you as a leader for the future. 

[00:04:22] Anne L: One of the strengths of ESSEC at that time, I think it's still the case now, is that you choose your own path. They tell you, you're autonomous, you're clever, you're smart.

[00:04:33] You can be whatever you want. You don't have to follow finance only or marketing only on any other path they choose for you. So that was one of the biggest advantage in ESSEC. Then the fact that we worked a lot in groups and we had a lot of group tasks. That was another way it shaped my career. Because it's not only the academia and what you learn that is important, but it's the way, uh, you behave with your teams and how you empower them.

[00:05:03] Because as a leader, you don't do. You're an enabler. You're no longer a doer. You have teams that are doers. So knowing how to interact with them, how to make them realize they can do much more than they usually do. They have strength that they may not know themselves. And the third aspect of ESSEC I loved was the entrepreneur classes.

[00:05:25] I remember one professor, he was teaching us entrepreneurship. So it was not only theory, but really practice because he was doing it every day. So the challenges he faced were real ones. The business case, again, were real ones. So that way of teaching shaped me as a leader. 

[00:05:43] Vanessa T: I really like what you said about the real world learning, and I think this is definitely one of the hallmarks of ESSEC, and we've heard this also in our discussions with other alumni and academics at ESSEC.

[00:05:56] You know, you mentioned a few things around learning by using real, live business cases, allowing someone to explore their areas of interest and to build on that, because Really, that's what happens in the real world and really what has helped you to, to have a career that has spanned multiple industries and leadership roles into multinational corporations, and now into founding an organization of your own focused on sustainability.

[00:06:23] Can you just share with us a standout moment or an experience from your diverse career journey that has really had that significant impact to your professional growth? 

[00:06:33] Anne L: I started at P&G as an intern just after school and I remember sitting in my office telling myself my career is done. I will follow the same path for 20 or 30 years. And my friends were going to, at that time, military service was still on in France.

[00:06:48] So my friends were going to military service or going to overseas service. So they were ending up in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Tanzania, having wonderful lives. And I was sitting in my desk in Paris, a very small cubicle there. And I thought, that's not what I want for my life. I'm going overseas. I want to move.

[00:07:08] So we decided with my husband that the first one to be able to be sent abroad, the other one would follow. And that's how we ended up in Shanghai. I had to reinvent myself completely because I followed my husband there. And I left a wonderful company, Procter & Gamble, where I had mentors and fantastic team to work with.

[00:07:29] And I found myself in a country, in a city I didn't know. And I had to reinvent myself and I ended up in Trois Suisses, uh, mail order company doing marketing. The years in ESSEC with all the classes I took on marketing helped me transition very easily. The fact that it was a mail order company and the ancestor of digital marketing, I would say, it was all about CRM, databases, uh, cluster of customers.

[00:07:57] It was easy for me to transition, but I always followed moments that could be personal that shaped my career. So with my husband, because we were both in our first years of careers, we had that agreement that if I was the one to choose a destination, for example, or a move, he would be the next one to do it.

[00:08:17] So we went to China for him, and then we went back to France, and that was his move. And the second time, it was my move. So we spent five years in France. We had two kids. One of my mentor asked me if I wanted to go back to China. And then my husband told me, it's your turn. So if you want to go back, let's do it.

[00:08:37] And then he followed me and he started his own company with that move. So the momentum I would say was the agreement in our couple to prioritize one career compared with another. And the mentors I had in each of my company I work with, I met fantastic people, but very often, there was one outstanding or who helped me more than the others.

[00:08:59] In the years where internet was arriving and mail order companies had to switch. And completely shift from a pure pattern or pure paper to pure digitalization. Olivier Beru, the head of strategy, teach me how to think out of the box, how to put creativity, shaping a strategy, because if you continue to do the work, the way we do year after year, when there is disruption. The company is not prepared for the disruption, not thinking like you used to think and is doing now a company called We Can Perfect the World, which is for me, one of the motto we have also at Matcha and dear to me. 

[00:09:39] Vanessa I: That's fantastic to hear how much you benefited from this incredible alignment with your husband and also all these mentors that supported your career and gave you opportunities because they saw most probably something in you and decided that you needed support.

[00:09:54] This is, uh, really interesting for both of us because we have never researched yet on this topic, uh, which is, uh, transition to sustainability, transition to nonprofit. We wanted to hear from you about the realization that you had and the fact that one day you decided that, okay, I'm going to create this organization or I'm going to participate to this organization that is going to help contribute to society, contribute to the world.

[00:10:17] Can you share with us about it? 

[00:10:19] Anne L: So, we have to go back before my China initiative to the first NGO I joined in Shanghai, which is an NGO buying office samples to underprivileged people in China. I was working as a CEO of Trois Suisses China. At the time where mail order was suffering, I saw the arrival of Taobao.

[00:10:39] We were one of the very first brand on Tmall. And I saw that huge wave coming. Trois Suisses didn't have the capacity to resist this big wave. One day, my, uh, direct manager asked me for the budget, and I was going to France for the yearly budget, and I had two budgets in my pocket. I had the, the budget she asked me to do, which was acceleration budget, and I told her, we don't have the capacity at Trois Suisses to resist to these huge wave. 

[00:11:11] So I gave her a budget of closure and I told her either we invest millions of dollars and we can build and stay as a profitable brand in China, either you have to close because the business in Europe is not going very well. So we have first to solve the problem in Europe, and then we can redeploy worldwide.

[00:11:31] If you have too many branches and if the trees is not going well, you need to cut some branches to help the main brand refocus, refine its purpose and its value added proposition, and then you can redeploy. So they were a little bit astonished by my budget and they told me, but you're the manager, so do you understand that by doing that you're losing your job?

[00:11:52] And I said, yes, I understand. But sometimes it's part of our job. We're not working to keep our jobs. We're working for a company and for the growth. We have many orders depending on us. So they told me they wanted me to go back to France and have a position in France. Um, since my husband get his own company in China to follow me, my kids were at school, very happy and told them I would like to stay in, uh, in China.

[00:12:20] So I had to reinvent myself again. I found out I needed purpose in my work, helping the world to be better with a purpose that was making me wake up in the morning, very cheerful and with energy. And I come up with this NGO and I started volunteering with them. Up to the point that I became the president of the NGO.

[00:12:39] And because I couldn't afford it at that time, I took it as a full job. Even though it was ordering, so I didn't get paid for it. As soon as you see that as a job, all what you learn in your corporate work, comes back, NGO is no different with a corporate. It is sometimes even more powerful in the way that people don't come to work for a salary.

[00:13:01] They come to work for a purpose or they come to work for something bigger. So you don't have to motivate them. You don't have to do team building or whatever, because the team building is the purpose that is the first front I see in sometimes in not for profit. 

[00:13:15] The second strength is that people are very autonomous. They do it because they like it and because they want to fulfill something. So if they tell you I'm going to organize an event, they will do it. 

[00:13:28] The third thing I learned was that you can't force a volunteer to do something he or she doesn't want to do. Because it's not a paid job, sometimes in paid job, you do things that you don't like to do, but because at the end of the day, you earn your salary, you have to do it.

[00:13:44] The compensation is the salary. In NGOs or not for profit, dealing with volunteers, the compensation is the win win. What do I get intellectually? What do I get in terms of good vibes, in terms of energy, in terms of network, in terms of opening my mind? This is the reward. So if that is not there, the volunteer will not do it.

[00:14:06] So in terms of management, you learn how to completely understand the other person and his or her personality. What motivates him or her internally. Find the place in the organization where he or she will gain the most. The organization will gain the most also. So we were taking second hand goods, clothes from expats or Chinese, sorting them and redistributing them.

[00:14:32] And we were also taking samples from buying offices, because at the time, it's still the case. China was the factory of the world. So you had all the buying offices from all the brands, fashion and toys. Any kind of products were made in China and you have to have at least four quality samples when you do a production.

[00:14:52] You put one in the factory and one or two stays in the buying office. At the end of the season, those samples are thrown away because they are not in the asset and they are not in the accounting books of the company. You can't send them. The company can only give to charity or throw them away. So it's a waste.

[00:15:13] They are exactly like the production, but because of accounting books and rules, you can't send those ones. So we were having loads and trucks of very good products, taking them at the end of every production cycle, sorting them, taking out the labels, pre distributing them to homeless centers, four schools in China, rural area where they were missing basic commodities and all what was not adapted, like lingerie, We were really doing it because it was like a gold mine for us.

[00:15:46] It was a resource that nobody saw as something able to generate revenue or helping people. So we were really doing it for the social aspect of it. 

[00:15:56] Vanessa T: And I think it's really interesting, all these different aspects of transitioning into the nonprofit aspect of work. And it's really fascinating to us how you keep up this momentum of learning a brand new industry, learning all these things about volunteers that you work with and the people that you ultimately serve.

[00:16:17] Tell us what motivates you to keep up this learning momentum. 

[00:16:20] Anne L: My curiosity, maybe from the very first day when I did business school to help others. I wanted my very first motivation. One of the things I say to the interviewers in ESSEC was I wanted to help entrepreneurs or I wanted to help business grow.

[00:16:37] And when you're helping business or helping a person, a human, uh, is the same, in fact, because business is at the end, it's a cluster of persons working together, it's helping humans. A motivation from day one was to help the individuals. So now working at Matcha Initiative, we help individuals in their professional lives to accelerate a sustainability.

[00:16:58] So we touch every kind of industry, every kind of job position, because for us, sustainability is in everybody's job. I think that's my motivation every morning, and that's super powerful, in fact. 

[00:17:11] Vanessa I: I'm sure many of our listeners are inspired by your very diverse and so purposeful career growth. When you think about what you know today that you didn't know when you started at ESSEC, what would be the top three pieces of advice you would like to share with our listeners to help them grow their career?

[00:17:30] Anne L: So first, find your mentors. That's very important. When we start, we don't know a lot of things, but there are brilliant people among us and people who can help us grow. 

[00:17:41] Especially as a woman, we may be afraid to start to ask questions, to join events, to raise our voice. And, the network can help a lot. 

[00:17:49] My third advice would be give to receive. And that's what I've learned in all those not for profit years. When you give, you receive 10 times more. Very often, people are takers. So they say, Oh, what is for me? And then they take back. But the one who understand that if you give first the same amount, then you receive 10 times more. It's amazing.

[00:18:11] So give first to receive. 

[00:18:13] Vanessa T: That's incredible. And, and I'm really inspired listening into and learning more from you about your journey into this space and your passion for helping others. You are certainly a purpose driven leader. And I, I think that many of our listeners. Today we'll be very inspired by your incredible journey.

[00:18:31] So we want to thank you for joining us today and for sharing your incredible journey, your insights, your expertise, and most of all, your passion, your passion for sustainability and your dedication to just driving that positive change is really such an inspiration to us. It has been such an honor having you on our podcast and we're grateful for your time, your wisdom and commitment, and we look forward to continuing to follow your impactful journey.

[00:18:55] Thank you so much, Anne. 

[00:18:57] Anne L: Thank you.