Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is Maureen Chiquet, the former longtime CEO of Chanel. Maureen also spent much of her career at The Gap, growing Old Navy from scratch and serving as the president of Banana Republic. The topic of discussion is her experience running large businesses and of finding one's way in a career and as a leader of others. I hope you enjoy this conversation and that it encourages you to, among other things, travel somewhere new and interesting in the coming year.
One of the most pervasive themes in the book, which is this ability to put yourself in other people's shoes. Maybe talk about that idea and how you came to that idea and why it's so important.

**Maureen Chiquet** (1:23)
Yeah, this is a really early lesson I had, but then it seemed to keep reinforcing itself throughout my career. So when I was at L'Oreal, the first thing they do at L'Oreal is you go on the road, sur la route they call it, and you become a sales rep basically with a little suitcase. Yeah, it was amazing. Now here I'm American by the way, and I'm 22 years old, and I'm sent to not any part of France. I'm thinking I'm going to go to the Cote d'Azur.
I am sent to the north of France, to the Ch'ti, which is coal mining country, and I get a hypermarket as my account. Fabulous. I'm like, okay, I can do this. It's the Mammoth really is the name of it. So I go in and I am, by the way, I have studied the marketing material because I'm a good student. And we were launching Studio Line hair gel or hair mousse.
And I have studied this and I know what it does for your hair, and I know how you should apply it.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:15)
All the facts.

**Maureen Chiquet** (2:16)
I am so good. I'm going to sell this to the same guy who sells frozen peas, who buys frozen peas and sanitary napkins. I'm like, I've got this one. And I walk in, I say hello to this guy. And, you know, I'm like getting out my marketing brochure and about to tell him how the mousse. Of course, he's got like shiny hair, brilcream hair, how the mousse is going to give him further expansion and more volume to your hair.
He's like, no, no, no. He's looking at me like just cut to the chase. And I soon realized that we were not speaking the same language. He wanted to know what kind of discount he would get. And I wanted to tell him my beautiful marketing product. So I realized I had to actually speak his language. I mean, I actually had to put myself in his shoes.
And that was the early lesson that helped me, I think, throughout my career.
Realize that we look at it one way, but we actually have to look at it in the ways that our customers look at it, our colleagues, our different people who work for us.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:05)
There's a guy I had on the podcast who started the company called Sir Kensington's, which is like a new ketchup company.

**Maureen Chiquet** (3:10)
Yeah, the mustard or ketchup.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:12)
And he told a similar story where he would go into restaurants and they would try to sell chefs basically on using Sir Kensington instead of Heinz.
And he'd tell them all the nutritional facts and the sourcing facts and all this stuff. And it just wasn't working.

**Maureen Chiquet** (3:27)
Right over the head.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:28)
And he realized that it was far more effective to sit and have a beer with them and understand their context and build a relationship that way and basically let them give him the door through which he could walk versus trying to ram facts that someone's throwing.

**Maureen Chiquet** (3:41)
That's exactly right. And know that I learned it even in a weird way when I was speaking French. The first time I went to France, you learn French out of a book. You have the grammar structure. You might know the words, but boy, go to a country and try to start speaking it every day. Things fall apart quickly and you quickly understand you can't translate. So I can't look at this thing sitting here called a table and say, table, what is table in French?