YouSaid · the spoken record

Maureen Chiquet

lines on the record: 66
first: 2018-12-04
most recent: 2018-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“People have done so many kind things for me. I wish I could come up with one. I mean, There's so many. It's funny. I can think of examples of my ex-husband who was very kind when we changed our relationship and became friends. I can think of my partner today who was so kind to be with me throughout that process of really figuring out who I was and separating from somebody I was with for 26 years. Like to me, I can think of my kids. I think of that part of my life because that was really that was like incredibly tough. It was incredibly tough after 26 years to change a relationship. My kids who held that space for me and who well might have been upset and angry like came back to me and trusted me to me, that's bad, another sheer kindness in that.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the food that we eat and about the way we grow it. Like, that's what she cares about in the world. And I love the fact, you know what? She's not looking to be CEO of anything. My younger daughter is now tutoring kids, inner city kids in Houston on how to write. And again, that's just something she cares a lot about. So when I look at, when I think about that, I just think life is short, you know. Yes, we all want to make a lot of money. We all want to have beautiful things. But in the end of the day, you know, I feel like you are sort of the actions that you take in the world. And those have to be close to what you care about. And I don't know. That may sound a bit trip, but that's...”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's interesting. I think because I have two girls who have recently finished college and are out in the world. One has just got a job, the other one's looking for it. One of the things I can say that I'm most proud of that I would encourage in both parents but also in the younger set of people who are looking for what they want to do is really staying close. I mean, people call passion. I don't think it's passion. Like it's way deeper than that. It's really staying close to that thing that makes your heartbeat. And I know I said that earlier, but one of my daughters is both of them graduated from Yale, so they can really do a lot of things. Jobs aren't that easy, even with that. But my oldest daughter has been dying to run an organic farm. So after Yale, she went off to work. Actually, she joined a program for an organic farm and would be off the coast of Seattle. So I think about that. And I think like she's doing something because she feels passionate.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. It's burdensome. But go hiking. I mean, it's really a question of a state of mind. Surround yourself with something that's incredibly beautiful. Go to a play. Like a couple weeks ago, I went to this play or this show in New York at Lincoln Center with the Shalon monks. So it's this incredible, you know, they practice this beautiful sort of artistry kind of dancing, martial art form. I went to it because the guy who choreographed it actually did something for my leadership work at Chanel. He choreographed some stuff for us in Morocco. I mean, I just got completely absorbed by the movements of these people on stage. It just, so I don't think, you know, I don't think you have to go to Africa. You know what I think it is? It's like letting go for a second of where you are in your complicated busy daily life and allowing yourself, you said it, the immersion into something that is greater than you.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our mind to try to figure stuff out. And by the way, I come back with a million ideas. If you can clear your, it's almost like a meditation to be there, you know”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always think of it as a sense of awe. And I have this, for example, I look out the window today, and this tree right here is so red and it's getting redder every day. And I every morning I wake up and look in it and I get a sense of awe in my heart, like that nature makes that happen. Like almost the absolute amazement of the natural world that we somehow get cut off from. And I think you can't help in a place like New Zealand where you're just, it is all around you or in Africa, we forget that this incredibly inherent life exists, we have beauty in life exists in our world. I think New Zealand sounds amazing. Africa, I'm addicted to it. It's almost like I'll go back whenever, you know, tell me when. I mean, the smallest things. And also I find that there's the reason we're so relaxed there is because we're engaging every part of our bodies and our senses. Like we're no longer using just that little thing called our.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it is, and I've also never been so tired after a day of riding around in a car. I mean, you're like, wait, what did you do today? I didn't exercise. I just rode around a car and I'm exhausted. Again, for me, it's being filled, having your senses filled and sort of entering into this world where you do see that everything is connected and you watch, you know, when the leopard is out and is approaching and you hear the goaway bird or you hear the barking of a impala, that sort of energy of everything working together to me is completely sort of I am no longer myself. It's almost like the eye disappears and I'm part of this bigger landscape called the world. And so for me, Africa has been, I don't know about you, but for me, Africa's been a lot about that kind of letting go of oneself and into this much bigger thing that is our universe.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That maybe not that long ago, but it's been a while. And I have never had a vacation where I've just forgotten about absolutely everything else.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, the French are interesting, and France is interesting because I find there's an embrace of everything that is beautiful and sensorial. And the French also, particularly in the south of France, which is what first attracted me to France, kind of take time living life. Like there's a sense that things slow down a bit, you know, before dinner you have la Peritif and the sun is setting and you're taking time with your family or with yourself to slow down and just look at what's beautiful in front of you. So I've been attracted to France, I think, for that incredible sense that the French just appreciate life. I mean, sometimes they can be, you know, in a hurry and ornery and all that, all the things and the reputation that Parisians have, but there really is a sense of enjoyment of something that tastes good, of something that looks good, of a beautiful smell. I think that's why they're so good at luxury, by the way. Africa is so interesting because I went for the first time probably 15 years ago, something like that.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't you sit there for a second and think about what it must feel like for him? Like, what do you, if you or him, how would this feel to you? And just that taking yourself even because I think that's in a weird way, that's introspective too. It's like pausing for a second to say, what must this be like on the other side? And all of a sudden he had a much greater understanding both of The other person, but also of himself, because he saw where he was hammering his ideas and sort of being stuck in his own way.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was, I mean, it was one of the things I used to teach young merchants. It's sort of like, I remember not even young merchants, I'm thinking about, at Chanel, I had a conversation with a guy once. He was working with an outside vendor and he was complaining about this vendor who was a creative guy and who was a little bit nutty. And he couldn't stand it because the creative guy could never hit the deadlines. And he's like, you know, and he does whatever he wants. He never hits the deadlines. And I had this, and this creative guys kind of a well-known guy. So I had to stop this person who's working for me and say,”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes you don't even know what you're feeling until you kind of talk about it. So I think that that process gets you into places that are sort of much more interesting than if you're ignoring your life. I know for me, I don't think I have would have started writing a TV show if I hadn't sort of been introspective and gone, wait, what is that tickle? Like, what is that, what's tickling me about this? Like, why do I find this so vibrant? It's not like I was looking for something to do. I'd come off just writing a book and I couldn't wait to do this. So something was coming up, but that anyone you might have that experience and ignore it because you've got a busy day, you've got kids at home. It's taking the time to do that, I think, kind of leads you, as Boyd would say, to your next track. I mean, for me, it's been the case anyway. And now it's sort of almost a habit. But you also start, I think, also with introspection, the other gift is that you start to see how other people see you in a way. Like you can step out of yourself more readily.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting for me, it's always been, I guess, always since I had a coach at the gap, so not always, always, but, and took note of the fact that when you actually sort of go deep within yourself, that there are resources that you never knew you had, there are ways, new ways of looking at problems that you think you can't solve. So I kind of feel like it's not just for a career, it's for a lifetime. You know, and now I'm finding in my partner test is a Zen student. We do meditation. But the more that I can sit with myself and with those thoughts, the more comes up. And what I find really interesting is it doesn't, introspection doesn't just have to be sort of an exercise. So it doesn't even have to be in meditation. It could be just spending some time considering where you are, who you are, or with your partner and doing the same thing. We spend lots of time talking about our lives, about our aspirations, about what we're feeling.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's it. And I think you're right. It's just kind of a system and a technique to, and what I learned with that is, you know, not just the courageous conversations in effect that you're having with someone else, but the ones that you're not having with yourself, like that self-reflection and even getting the members of my team at Chanel to sort of think about where they are was incredibly helpful. So I had one guy, for example, who was in marketing, a really talented marketer, but his love and his strength was in the creative process. And I think I could kind of see myself in him and sitting down and asking him, have you had this conversation with yourself? And then eventually him sort of revealing to me, yeah, I'd love to be in creative and moving him, and he's now the creative director of the fragrance and beauty area and watches and find jewelry. So I think these conversations can apply to so many parts of our lives.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New talent I mean, so I kind of look at that, and it's hard with cultural change, right? Because you can't, there's no ROI you can directly put on these kinds of things, except that you're changing the mindset of a company so that they're prepared to deal with a future that's way less certain, way less known than the past, right? And to me, that's sort of what CEOs should be doing.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, inertia sometimes a lot of times just avoidance because it's painful and it's hard like when David White tells a story, he talks about his daughter stomping up the stairs and him coming going into her bedroom with a cup of tea and saying, let's just talk about this because we ask them later, so how do you have a courageous conversation? And his first thing is change the conversation that you're in, change the conversation that you're in. And it really makes a lot of sense whether it's a personal thing. I mean, people came back from, I had one guy on the team who came back from this session with David White, and it was a great decision because it was time for him. He decided that he was going to retire because it was a conversation he had been avoiding having and he sat down with his wife. And so it was touching, you know, say, is that good or bad? How does that help the business? Well, actually it does because.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“70% higher than in Europe. Part of it had to do with the appreciation of what the WAM, but it was a really messy situation, mostly because there's a lot of gray market out there when that happened. But we made this decision that it wasn't fair for Chinese customers and we were engendering a business that we didn't believe was a good business, which is selling goods for pretty much a black market, that we should harmonize us. And everybody else in the industry, when we did it, you know, their jaws were dropping. Wait, what about margin? What about It was the best decision we ever made. It completely changed the game for us. So that kind of idea came out of someone not being afraid to say it. And I think when you create an environment where people trust each other, you can do things that you've never expected to do before.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third guy raises his hand and said, I'm terrified of the unknown, which is why I'm so slow to make decisions. So from that day forward, it was almost like something broke open and we could be real with each other. We could be in a space of vulnerability. And what that did, and it's a long story, but what that did was that actually helped us be more innovative. Because when you can trust that your team members aren't going to shoot you down or that you're not going to be humiliated or embarrassed by an idea, you come up with a hell of a lot more ideas and you listen a lot more because you know how somebody feels. So all of a sudden from that day forward, it was kind of the beginning and ideas began to germinate a lot more so we could do things like one of the famous things that gets quoted in a lot of like articles about my time at Chanel, we harmonize our prices around the world. Nobody in luxury had ever thought to do that. So there was a time that our prices in China were.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm now with my paper in my hand, my hands are, I almost feel it. My hands right now is sweaty, and I look up and I'm thinking I've just totally screwed myself. This is like, this is a disaster. And I see these empathetic eyes and like almost like people could see themselves in what I had said. And even tears in some people's eyes. But then the weirdest and craziest thing happened, which kind of gets to the point of the story. Is a guy in the back row who, by the way, was the same guy who said, Jardin Donfant, he very skeptical guy. He's looking at his feet and he like raises his hand halfway and he goes, I'm an imposter. He goes, I pretend to know things that I don't, so I can impress my teams. A second guy raises his hand. I cannot kidding. And these are guys, by the way, at this point in their fifties. Second guy raises his hand and he says, I don't really listen. I just try to validate my point of view.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David decides to wrap up the day. He calls everyone back. And people, by the way, were really moved by the extra, you could see sort of the intensity and calls everyone back in the room. Moy, do you have anything else to say? And I have to say that whole time I was feeling so out of integrity because it was like I'm making them do work that I'm not doing. And I did something I never expected. Like I just, it was like a last minute crazy thing to do, but I got up and my legs were literally like shaking underneath me and my hands are trembling and sweaty. And I got up and I said, here's the courageous conversation that I'm not having with you. I said, sometimes I'm afraid. Sometimes I'm worried you don't trust my leadership or you want answers to questions that I just can't give you. But I can't and I shouldn't run this company without you. So I need your help.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On how that applies to the company or not. So the idea was we would break up into teams of two and talk about a courageous conversation that we weren't having, possibly with our teams outside of this room so that people felt safe. Went ahead and started the exercise two by two. They picked a partner, and I realized I didn't really have anyone to have a courageous conversation with. So it was kind of like, okay, well, what do I do? But I'll just, I guess I'll just sit here and write my courageous conversation. So I also started watching them and they were really into it. So I started writing, here's a courageous conversation I guess I'm not having with them.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smoke a cigarette. It was incredible. But what he does is he talks about his own life stories. He tells about a time that his daughter and he got in a big fight and how that resolved. He talks about when he lost his best friend. He talks about leaving his job and going into his calling as a poet. And he's weaving everything with his poetry, but also with a notion called courageous conversations. And these are the conversations that we're supposed to be having, but that we're not having or that we're too afraid to have. It could be conversations with the world. It could be conversations or the future. It could be a conversation with your team or with your partner or conversation with yourself. So what are these conversations that you're not having that you need to be having? So he talks, and again, nobody moves. It's incredibly sort of intense. And then we designed, part of this program was initiative, I should say, is you get speakers, but you work with them on their material.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think really the lack of the collaboration that came from being able to be much more vulnerable with each other and much more real. So I have a little story about that. Our first speaker was a guy named David White. So David's a poet, but he's a poet who has an emphasis on leadership and especially on introspection, on self-reflection. So even though my team, by the way, was now on board, this is January, when they heard that for our leadership initiative, the first person was a poet, they looked at me like I had ten heads. They're like, are you kidding us a poet? So David, and it's worth looking up because he's got a beautiful voice and his poetry is amazing. David comes in. He's an English guy. He's got a brogue. And he's very masculine. And he stands there and talks for two and a half hours. And at the beginning, I'm thinking, oh my God, this is going to be disaster. Two and a half hours and no one moved. No one even went out to...”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of role do you want to play? Who will you be in this? So I spent two hours with 20 people basically one by one and collective a lot of Collected everything, collated all their ideas into something that we call the Frums and the Tos. And we met again in October, sat around a much smaller, in a much smaller, more discreet room, and that meeting went a lot better. And that was the birth of this leadership initiative, which we, by the way, I fired the consultants. We decided to create from scratch and we decided to do it collaboratively so that they could have a part in what we were going forward with.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had an off site booked in September. It's now July, you know, whatever, 15th or 20th. And I really just sat there and thought, you know what? I realized what a mistake I'd made. I thought, I got to push a reset button. I'm going to stop everything, cancel the off-site, and start over. I know that actually these qualities that I think that we need to have not just because they're femininely, you know, that's sort of a, that's actually a label that I don't know that I even really believe. But we need to have these qualities because they're 21st century qualities. These are things that we need in our world with or interconnectedness, with our globalization for millennials. These are things that we need to possess in a much greater quantity than we have them. But I didn't go about it right. So I wrote a note to my team and said, look, I'm canceling the offsite. I don't think we're ready. And I actually want to hear from you what you think is right about the culture, what you think needs to change.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a disaster. I then take them back in and I get up in my band and said, We need more feminine leadership skills. We need to collaborate and listen and be agile. I was like obviously not walking the walk, right? I totally, I sort of totally missed it. Anyway, they literally nearly kicked me out of the room. Total tissue reject. And, you know, shells have very, the culture is very defined there. So when things aren't going well, you know it. And I knew it right away. But in addition to feeling that things weren't going well, when people don't want to do something, particularly I guess this is true of France. I'm not sure about the States, but France is true. They take out their calendar and they show you all the reasons why they can't do it because they're way too busy. So like we don't, we're not going for this. Get back home. This is utter disaster. What am I going to do? My coach calls me, the HR person calls me. The consultants call me. We're going back and forth.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're getting ready for their August vacation. So either they're cramming to get done or their head's already in Provence. I mean, so forget about it. You're not going to get anything done. But I decide I have to do it. This is the right timing. I haul them into a conference room, actually not even conference room. It was a ballroom somewhere in the west of Paris. It was spitting rain that day. That was not my fault. But then I decided that we needed to do some team building exercises. So I take my very French team out to the garden and it's now raining. And I ask them to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. This one guy in my team goes, which is basically, that's his kindergarten.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am going to do this and I'm going to launch some feminine leadership skills within this group of still mostly men, but some women. So I had a coach at the time. And I wanted to get it done right away. You know, you said you can't airdrop it? I wanted it airdropped right away. So it's now July. I hire this team of consultants from California. Don't forget my team is still mostly European. And I don't know what I was thinking, but I did that. And then it was a month of July. I decided I'm going to take my team off site in July and we're going to launch the beginning of this program. Now, July, if you worked with anyone in France. No. Okay, so July is the worst month of any time that you can pick to launch a program like that. It's like, it's.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collaboration, flexibility, curiosity, all these things are leadership qualities we need to possess. And we're going to change our culture to integrate those qualities into it. And by the way, this is at the same time that there's all these sociologists coming up with this term feminine leadership skills. And I'm like, right, score. I met Chanel. I'm a woman. We have lots of women who work here. We service women. And by the way, she was an iconoclastic woman. This is great.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, a daunting problem. Yeah, you have to be pretty patient, number one, because I consider it's like a five year minimal process. But my thought was this. And here's the kind of funny thing. We were in a meeting and we do these things like, you know, what do you think is good about our company, our brand? What does everybody think is right? What does everything everybody think changes? Everybody kept blaming this person called culture. I was like, so wait a minute. Who is this person culture? And they kind of all looked around. I said, guys, I think it's us. So at this point, by the way, there were 20 of us and there were women on the team, thankfully. I'd done part of my moving and integrating other pieces. But so I decided to launch this initiative. But what was kind of interesting about that, because you're right, you can't just drop it in, is how I went about it, which by the way is a story about the biggest flop of my entire career. We'll go down in history, I think. So I now have taken note that listening and”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that led me to this is a little bit later on, thinking about having to transform our culture. Because what I realized is despite all my efforts to do this and all the things that CEOs do, like roles and responsibilities and org charts and move people right and move people left, that this was actually something fundamentally cultural. Like we grew up in a culture where command and control leadership is the right kind of leadership. However, when you have countries all over the world and now tens of thousands of new employee, of employees, but then lots of them new coming into countries in China, you can't command and control. You actually don't have the power to do that. So you've got to create a culture where people fundamentally understand your brand. And in order to do that, we all had to shift our leadership. So that's when I started this immense leadership initiative, which we didn't call a program because I always feel programs are like start and stop. Whereas leadership is something.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I realized I can't go, like, you know, first of all, I can't go back and look at the Wall Street Journal to figure out how to be a leader because that's not going to work with these guys. But by the way, they can't go back to their history books either because anything that they were used to doing before is going to changing. So that's when I started realizing, you know, I need to engage in sort of a different way of being, but probably so do they. So maybe we could do this together. And it was then I started to shift my own leadership style into a much more listening, much more collaborative, you know, really getting their points of view, sitting at their side of the table, trying to figure out how to create teams in new ways where not everybody was silent in his or her region or his and her business unit, but really getting us to work and breaking that up differently.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business, so all that opposite stuff that you really want to do, the internet is now sort of dispossessing, right? Right.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way, I was cooked, but coming into that, there was no way that they could trust that I was going to be their boss, yet I was. And so I had to start to think about how am I going to be as a leader when they have more experience than I have and when probably they don't really trust what anything that I'm going to say. So I can't like go back to my leadership books and get a vision and have a strategy and, you know, go ahead and rally that team because they're not going to believe me. I've really got to think about a new way of doing things, not to mention the fact that this was 2007, so three huge phenomena for us. The first was the internet. This is the beginning of the digital boom. And for a luxury company, it wasn't just an opportunity. It looked like a tremendous risk because we just talked earlier. It's all about exclusivity and rarity. And now you've got your message blasted all over the internet. Anyone can say anything about you. It's about control in the luxury.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. And it was a really interesting time. So I took over Chanel, it was 2007 as a CEO. I was 2003, joined the company. And you got to picture this because it was a crazy thing. I sit down at my executive table and there are around the table 10 men and me now I'm about 43 years old. They're at least 10 years. I mean, some of them were 20 years older than I was. I am American. I speak French, but I am American and they are literally all European with maybe the exception of one and mostly French. And my claim to fame is I have sold millions of units of flag teas off the back of a Chevy truck in a strip mall in the USA, and these guys have all been in the luxury business, and I kid you not twenty plus years most of them at Chanel. So you can imagine that coming into that...”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, he goes, Not just because I'm the boss, I just mean, listen, like open your ears to your customers, to the world outside of you. You got to listen. And it was one of the best lessons that I ever had and it stuck with me because, you know, he was right. I had was on my train and I wanted to sell him something and I wasn't taking in any of what he was saying nor any of the reaction of anyone around the table. And from that moment on I really learned that lesson from Mickey and watched him do this in meetings where Mickey had always had has a strong point of view, but I would watch him in meetings and he would think something is great, but then he'd turn around and he'd ask like 10 people in the audience, what do you guys think? And he really was open and porous to the way other people were looking at something. And to me, that was such a great lesson. And to be honest, he wasn't saying that because he was the boss. He really was saying that because he listens to people.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mickey, this wasn't even fit, and the sales are declined. And he starts sort of almost foaming at the mouth. He was so angry. And finally said, you know, they didn't hire me or put me in this position for you to tell me what was right or something. Anyway, he walked out of the room, stormed out. He was really angry because I was fighting with him on it. And I'm seven months pregnant. I'm like, I've just lost my job. I'm like, I have to call my husband. I don't know how we're going to make ends meet. I don't know what we're going to do. I go back to my desk. I'm crying. I get a call immediately, like second later. Hey, Maureen, Mickey. Shit, this is where it is listen, you're a really great merchant, but you got to learn to listen.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Young merchant, and you know, I don't think I was arrogant, but I think I thought I knew what I was doing. So he said, show us your jeans. I show him that jean. I said, this is going to be our number one gene. It's in this fancy new Japanese fabric. And he feels the fabric. He's like, yeah, but I don't get it. Yeah, the fabric's fabulous. Why aren't you doing that your classic fit gene? This is the gene that we were selling the most of. I was like, oh, because the classic fit doesn't, it's like not cool. Like, you know, it doesn't fit well. It's high in the waist. And it looks like genes that people are wearing right now, by the way, but high in the waist and pegged at the leg and everyone's wearing wide-linked jeans. He's like, how many of the classic fit are you selling? And I had to go look at my trend and 20,000. How many of, and he said, do you have a jean like this one, this new one that you want me to do? And I said, yeah, it's the wide leg, but we're out of stock. And he said, yeah, but how many selling of it? It's like 3,000. He goes. Anyway, he started to get really angry at me because I kept arguing. I was like, I know, but nobody.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Mickey is incredible. He's an incredibly dynamic person to work with and for. But my favorite, one of my favorite Mickey's stories is when I was a young merchant, turns out we were going to do a marketing campaign for Denim and I was in charge of Denham. Now, Denham was not my favorite job only because there were a lot more logistics than other merchandising jobs. But my boss was on maternity leave and he was going to determine what jeans would be in the shot in the next campaign. And the head of advertising was in this meeting and they called me in. I was seven months pregnant. And I am like running. By the way, Mickey, when Mickey calls, you go right away. There's no time to spare. So I'm waddling down with my huge belly down the hall of the gap. I've got my jeans on a rack. I've thrown them together. And I had decided that we were going to really go after this stove pipe gene. It was a brand new denim. I was really, I was pumped about it.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge growth that we had. So it was in 19, I was there in 1989 from 1989 to 2003. So 89 was right before the gap got great. I went to Old Navy, gap started to kind of go down, but I went to Old Navy and then we built that land. Rocket ship. I go into luxury. 2003, right before the huge luxury boom. So I kind of feel like there's for me there's energy there too. You're like following not on like void varti and his tracking. You're following something that feels energetic to you because you connect to it.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I studied film when I was young. I've always loved stories. I have a lot of stories to tell because I have a sort of rich past, I think, with, you know, 13 years at one of the highest level luxury companies in the world. And while my story won't be in the way of transparent, it will probably touch on some things that happen in my life, but not really, it would be fictional. It just felt like the right thing to do. I have no idea how to do this. I've signed up for a school in New York. I took lessons. I actually threw a really great number of sort of luck and really through the school met somebody who I could co-write with. And that's really been it. But it's just kind of like almost like this weird pull that I get. It was like that Miles Davis poster on the street. You see something. You go, God, that feels really vibrant to me. Not to mention the fact that I end up going where energy is. And I don't know when I started think about this. When I started at Gap, it was right before the...”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are actually questioning their identity. You know, obviously my book is called Beyond the Label. So, you know, it's still kind of a thing that intrigues me. So I went from there and I started watching shows like billions and handmade's tale and what are we watching now? We're watching succession.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't heard of it. It's exceptional. A person named Jill Solloway did it, and it's about their father. And their father became, well, I guess became a woman when they were when he was 70. So she now is a woman. And so really that's the idea of the show. But the way that it's shot, so the subject matter is kind of one of the subjects you don't really expect. A trans woman at the age of 70 coming out, it's actually a true story somewhat. But it's a show that you don't expect. So it was unexpected topic. But more than that, the way that it was shot was completely different than any other TV show I'd ever seen. It was almost, it felt very organic and it felt like you were entering into somebody's family and sort of dealing with all their family dynamics around identity, really, around who I am, what is my gender, or not. So it was a really fascinating show for me. And I thought, God, something appeals to me about this kind of story where”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly. And I'm pretty good at seeing things. I have a discerning eye, I think. Anyway, I hope. So it's natural that this love of beauty and a discerning eye kind of go together. And then the third thing is your circumstances, sort of where are you in life? I mean, sometimes we have to take jobs that we don't want to take. Sometimes we have to do things because we can't relocate. And I feel like that's equally important in all those things way on how you can kind of fashion your purpose. But what I say to people in those cases is within the job that you're doing, what can you find that really gets you excited? And how can you begin to tilt in that direction? So like I think about L'Oreal, I had a classic marketing job. I was a product manager. But what I so loved was the creative side of the job. I so loved being with the art director going on photo shoots. And literally almost in a physical way, if we were at one of those tables, I would move closer to the creative folk. So I think there's almost a way of intent.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's so, it's funny. I talk to a lot of students, go to universities and do chats, or the other, actually this week, I did a talk at BlackRock for the women in BlackRock in their Lat M division. So a lot of young women were there. And there's always this question like, how do you figure this out? How do you find this? And I always say like to connect that to a job, there are three things that I always consider. I'm in this question, by the way. There are three questions, I should say. I'm in these questions all the time. The first is What do you really care about? When you eliminate getting that promotion or making more money or having that great new house underneath all that, what do you really care about? What makes your heartbeat fast? What could you not live without? To me, that's the first thing you want to identify. The second thing is what are you good at? I mean, what are you naturally gifted at? And everybody has something. And usually those two things are kind of connected.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very similar thing. There was something about the beauty that they were creating for women and also giving to women to a certain degree was something that touched me. So I've actually seen my purpose evolve a little bit, but really remain similar no matter what articulation it is. So right now, for example, I'm trying to write a TV show. I'm fascinated by TV. It's become a bit of an obsession. It's so good right now. The stories that are being told are amazing. And I was a literature major. And the other thing that I've always loved other than France was stories. I think stories have the power to change the world in many ways. So it's, but I'm finding that what I'm writing about still is, you know, how do you begin to find beauty in yourself? How do you begin to find beauty in other people? So I'm still finding that that theme resonates from my life just a different way of going about it or articulation of it.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. It's so interesting. You know, I don't know that when I was 22 in graduating college, I had any clue of a purpose other than I want to live in France. But that's actually something because in that was a deep, deep love for beauty. I wouldn't have been able to call it that when I was 22 years old. But, you know, the first time we went to the south of France and I saw the way the sun set on these gorgeous limestone buildings and the sound of the cicadas and the smell of the lavender, I was hooked on something that felt really important to me. And I kept that within me and I kept that throughout my career, realizing that as it evolved, it was actually really about beauty in general, not just of things, not just of places, but beauty and people. And so I think that's kind of kept me going from job to job. It certainly my story about going to the gap the first time, what did I see? I saw something that touched my heart because it was beautiful. When I went to show.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we've studied this, we've studied that, we've looked at it from 10 different angles. We think this is it. No, I think, for example, Chanel, when she started her business in the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, she wanted women to be free to move. That was really what she wanted. She wanted to be free to move. It came from such a pure instinct of just like, I hate wearing a freaking corset. You know, and I think women should be able to move too. To me, that's purpose. And if you can continue to capture, that gets back to our conversation a little bit on history versus modernity. To me, that's a modern idea. That's still a modern idea. You can take that idea and continue to contemporize it. And it is a purpose.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's really a great point. It's because a lot of times, you know, I think we're seeing a lot right now, these great businesses being built by HBS graduates who have an idea. And sometimes they're great ideas and they really are purposeful. And other times it feels a little bit like...”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, you know, everything's changed so much. I think the most important thing is what is your purpose? Why are you here? Why are you doing what you're doing? And for me, that seems to be equally, if not more important than any other aspect of a brand that you can have. So I think about purpose brands as being, you know, I don't know, Nike's a great example of a purpose brand. They're here to make everyone athletes in their mind. Everyone's an athlete. And that's core to their being. So everything they do exudes that purpose. And everyone isn't a random word either. It's really about it doesn't matter who you are, your gender, your race. You two are an athlete for them. For me, Chanel was also to give women confidence or something about being able to really give women confidence. Once you have that to me, you can hang so much else off of that. But if you're missing a purpose and lots of brands are, I think the chances of success today where they're literally also hundreds of thousands.”
2018-12-04 · Invest Like the Best · Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations - [Invest Like the Best, EP.113] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source