【OHI】Bertrand de La Chapelle interview selection
I think it is part of the understanding of where you work best and where you contribute the most. You know in business and in policy, there are different roles that people play. There are people who are remarkable managers of a very large company and people who are more of entrepreneurial type and starting things when things are early and I’m clearly more of the second category, I think the world needs both.
I think it is part of the understanding of where you work best and where you contribute the most. You know in business and in policy, there are different roles that people play. There are people who are remarkable managers of a very large company and people who are more of entrepreneurial type and starting things when things are early and I’m clearly more of the second category, I think the world needs both.
Bertrand de La Chapelle
“Try to do the best one”
BZ: Who influenced you the most when you were pursuing your engineering education, later on, got into diplomacy?
BL: I don’t think there was a… apart from the two professors that I had, basically when I was like 14 and 17 who came from that school and, I mean you are familiar with the maybe with the French Academic system or education systems. There are schools, when you have the possibility to do the best one while you try to do the best one, so that is what I did.
It’s less influenced, I think this influence by those teachers were more on the substance the interest for the science, the natural science physics and the rest, rather than the encouragement to do a particular to school or career. And I think in both cases, both for engineer school and for the national school of Administration. This was also what opened the broadest range of possible activities afterwards. They are considered to be among the best schools in France. It was a good formation, a good opening. it ended, it ended up being 12 years altogether.
“You work best (at) where you contribute the most.”
BZ: alright, so can you tell like the one or two successful stories or not so successful story while you were running the company and virtual tools and you know engage people there
BL：Yeah, there was one of the most successful visible application. At the time you may know there were companies called Silicon Graphics. They were the provider of 3D, graphic cards and big machines. And there is a trade show every 2 years in the Rennes for the outer space industry. And at the time Airbus was developing what came to become the A380, the big double deck plane and they asked us, a small company, to develop the application for the trade show to present what this plane would look like in the future. So we had to take the digital data mock-up, turn it into an interactive walkthrough, and bring to France for the show. A machine that had never come to Europe before. It was a huge computer graphic machine like 8 processors, 3 graphic cards and so on. And a very big visualizing system that was called the boom. And it was the most advanced application at the time, in terms of visualizing computer designing data. It remained, I would say something that the graphic company used for several months afterwards maybe two years, as a presentation of the performance of their tools. There so that was a big...a big success.
BZ: You must feel very good when you were running such a successful company, which take lead in terms of technology.
BL: It is exciting; it is exciting to innovate and to establish things that are really different.
BZ: Never happened before?
BL: No, there was a, was a new field.
BZ: So why at this so reward position working in like a very successful company and you decide to back to foreign affairs?
BL: I think it is part of the understanding of where you work best and where you contribute the most. You know in business and in policy, there are different roles that people play. There are people who are remarkable managers of a very large company and people who are more of entrepreneurial type and starting things when things are early and I’m clearly more of the second category, I think the world needs both. And that goes for policy and for technology. When you create a startup, the founder is not necessarily the person that brings it to the biggest development I mean not everybody is Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. And by the way, even at one point people thought that Steve Jobs was not able to grow the company anymore and got out. I think that was a mistake. So fundamentally, I think I had played the role that I could play for the company, putting in the ground, raising the capital, helping the management to put in the place. And I felt it was the time to reconnect the other parts. The position was interesting, because in Ministry of foreign affairs, here again it was a new department, so it was a sort of the new startups inside the ministry of foreign affairs, so it was a challenge as well. Actually, it is interesting of the question, I did not feel like it was coming back, it was creating something new in a new environment.
