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Finally, François Michelin has spent his whole life to tame death. He’s only 10 years old when her mother disappears. His father died in turn four years later. And then there is also the son, whom he had managed to make his successor at the head of the family business, who accidentally kills in 2006. In his last interview in May 2013 Paris Match François Michelin evoked his report to the dead, death: “Faith leads to the concept of eternal life. There is no loss. Life is changed, it is total, “ he preached for the last time before his rocker definitively on April 29, 2015. One who made Michelin one of the sector’s global leaders died at the age of 88 years.
Born June 15, 1926 in Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dome, the orphaned boy is raised in the religion by his aunt, in Savoie. Faith is one of the two keys to understanding the progress of this pattern both unusual and secret. The other is the company’s gum rubber manufacturing including his grandfather, on his deathbed, entrusted the reins in 1940, while his father has just been killed in a plane crash .
Pending a capacity to take over the family business, his uncle, Robert Puiseux, acted as regent until 1955. Meanwhile, François Michelin, after a degree in mathematics, following an initiatory journey of four years in Clermont workshops. In 1959, he became co-manager, then “only boss after God,” as he likes to remind us regularly. Beginning a papal reigns supreme, long of 43, which will end in May 2002, the statutes of the company were staring an age limit, but not on terms. Governance of another time, like a man from another era.
The revolution of radial
Throughout his François Michelin life has professed a social and political conservatism out of age, which ended up making it unclassifiable and iconoclastic among his peers. Christian, liberal reactionary accents, impregnated personalism, he constantly sought to make sense of things starting from the observation of facts, the better to distance certainties-made or modes.
This high pragmatism to the rank of philosophy, he will apply in his first no boss by multiplying the tire plants radial tire. This revolutionary process is the fruit of the imagination of an obscure engineer Marius Mignol. It browses three times more kilometers with a metal structure. Yet the first reaction in the business was to bury the project. The patent was filed in 1946, but marketing is performed only dropper. Think! If durability of the tire is increased, factories turn less. Some consider that this amounts to shoot themselves in the foot.
François Michelin is the only rationality to overcome this short-sighted thinking that on the contrary, the radial tire is going to take a decisive technological advance the Clermont group. The facts give him reason. In less than four decades, the small provincial tire manufacturer will become the global industry leader in turn standard of France abroad, but also social barometer of the hex-industrialization.
Shock oil and declining
Because if for years, manufacturers will ask and ask again radial, François Michelin does not happen the second oil shock. In the early 1980s, the group has over-invested. As demand falls, losses are increasing. This is the beginning of a long decline of Clermont numbers, which will pass in the twenty-year period from 30 000 to 15 000 employees. For several months, François Michelin remains prostrate, not seen at the factory, rumors about his health began to run.
In 1982, to save the company, it must resolve to use to public authorities in the form of a loan of 4 billion francs. A real heart-breaking for the one who has always criticized interventionism in all its forms: state, employers and even trade union, which had prompted him to slam the door of the National Council of French Employers, forerunner of the Medef in 1968, after the Grenelle agreements, blaming the boss of bosses of the time, Paul Huvelin, having too dropped on wages and paves the way for union representation.
For the first time its history, in the early 1980s, the Michelin Man, symbol of the group since 1898, so has one knee. This will not be the last. In 1989, Michelin decided to accelerate the US by acquiring Uniroyal Goodrich. This strategic shift is logical since it is the first market in the world where the French group from 10 to 25% market share. But François Michelin negotiates in the worst conditions. This acquisition is done under the pressure of the enemy, the Japanese Bridgestone, Firestone has just overpay. Michelin believes that it must at all costs not to fall behind. But the timing of the redemption of Uniroyal Goodrich is catastrophic.
Merger and restructuring
The crisis is back and Michelin has had to borrow a lot. Once again, the tire manufacturer passes on the verge of bankruptcy and will take years to digest its US acquisition. François Michelin entrusts the task to a young manager of 37 years, he spotted his arrival in the group: Carlos Ghosn, who already has to his credit the recovery of Brazilian operations Michelin in Brazil. Within three years, he managed to successfully merge at the cost of major renovation. Then enters into a trust between the two men as to convince François Michelin to the future boss of Renault Nissan’s mentor his son Edward, he sent to him in the US for its ranges.
Having named this son Edward as the grandfather of Francis, the founder of the group, does not that of the family tradition. The young man was very early to succeed the father, even if he does not want to admit. In fact, in 1996, Carlos Ghosn soon realized he would never become patron of Michelin and Renault joined. So we asked if Edouard François Michelin will actually become the fourth manager from the family, caution snatches this premonitory statement: “If God gives him life. “The loan will be short term. Four years after the accession to the direction of Edouard Michelin, it drowns off the island of Sein during a routine fishing trip. A whole section of what François Michelin has built collapses.
The Last of the Mohicans
The illusion that the destiny of the company remains in the family fold still survives a few years when Michel Rollier, the grand-son of the aunt who raised François Michelin, succeeded in 2006 to Edward.
Although François Michelin still maintains an office at the Carmelites, the seat the company, in Clermont-Ferrand, his whereabouts to retrieve his mail are increasingly spaced. It’s hard to hide a certain disillusionment when he looks at the company to modernize under the thumb of his new boss, Jean-Dominique Senard since 2012. “Michelin is now led by traders’ Had he let go one day. With a certain nostalgia for paternalism and an assumed Taylorism, he defined himself as the last of the Mohicans.
In 1988, when Mr. Michelin offers its employees 20 cents of hour increase, he pretends to be surprised that they take the proposal for a provocation. At every turn, he openly professes his lack of labor law, “Marxist, because based on the class struggle.” Provocation even when management decides staff in 1999 , to label the pay slips with the word “price paid by the customer for your work” . Condemned by justice, Michelin will return to a more conventional pay slip. Shaped epitaph, he dropped in his last interview: “What remains of life is what we learned from men. “
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