He enrolled in the Global MBA at ESSEC Business School in 2012, after a lengthy career in the military which included deployments with NATO in Afghanistan, the United Nations on the Ivory Coast, and as a team commander overseeing 150 soldiers in the French army.
Matthias, who has four kids, also served as head of real estate finance for the French military, responsible for buildings, training camps and army bases, with a €200 million yearly budget.
Since graduating from the MBA in 2013, he has also worked for the Djibouti Economic Development Fund, which provides financing for small and medium sized businesses in the African nation. More recently he landed a job as general manager for CMA CGM, the shipping group with 20,000 employees, in Gabon, also in Africa.
You’ve worked in Paris, Djibouti, Bolivia and Gabon. How did the MBA prepare you for a global career?
The ESSEC Global MBA is mainly focused on strategy and how to make a company global. It looks at local and global issues, such as cultural differences, legal constraints, organizational pitfalls, and political issues.
As a result, we dealt with intercultural differences and ways to maximize benefits from this diversity. This started from the class mix: we were less than 30, but a representative sample of all continents. This mix was a great learning experience: imagine yourself in Bolivia with Chinese and Japanese classmates who don’t speak the local language, in a sector you have never touched before. This is clearly a pragmatic way to build self-confidence and to get used to dealing with diversity.
You have a lengthy background in the army. What skills are transferable from military to management?
An army officer shares common managerial practices with a business manager: the military officer has to be honest, organized, competent, and just.
According to my experience, the main similarity is the final goal of the activity and the environments; uncertainty is everywhere. As a result, an officer has to be a leader — more so than a business manager — making decisions fast, under strong pressure to preserve the life of his soldiers. This decision making ability is highly valuable and is often what organizations expect from their business managers.
In such environments cohesion is also a key success factor. Thus, team building and the capability to build trust are important.
How does running a public finance unit compare to the private sector?
Be it public or private, it is all about maximizing money in a constrained environment. That means taking risks.
The first thing which is clearly different is the objective: the final goal was not profit but to ensure an adequate level of service with a restricted budget. The main goal of public finance is to maximize productivity and investment for the benefit of the society. It is hard to value the ROI.
In the private sector, it is also a matter of maximizing the ROI but the final goal is mainly about profit maximization.
What does a French military officer do in his downtime?
As a former mountain climbing infantry officer, I enjoy skiing, climbing, and walking.
But the main part of my free time is devoted to my four kids. It’s not always that easy to balance professional and personal life.
Having taken the decision to move abroad, I am very happy to discover new countries and cultures with my family. After Africa, the next step is Vietnam, where we are moving for two years by the end of November.
You advised Grameen-Veolia Water on a sustainability project. Should more MBAs be involved in social enterprise?
I believe that studying social and sustainability cases during an MBA is very important, as it provides a social approach for future managers.
MBA programs don’t aim to provide social enterprise leaders, but leaders with social understanding. Thus, I do believe it is necessary to give space to such study in MBA courses, but it has to remain a restricted part of the program.
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