Her professional experience is relatively simple, and she has only worked in three companies. She was originally an ordinary marketer in L 'Oré al France, and was upgraded to assistant product manager after many tests. Later, she and her lover returned to the United States and joined the GAP, almost starting with training students in socks and belts. Later, she was appointed as the executive vice president of Gap's old naval company, and later promoted to the banana * * * and China president of Gap, and was selected by Chanel as the American CEO and the global CEO of Chanel. From ordinary employees to the peak of the workplace, Maureen summed up her advanced approach as deep thinking, that is, constantly approaching the essence of the problem and connecting everything with deep thinking.
Maureen has many qualities of success. She is sincere and open, good at listening, proactive and full of curiosity. She dares to break labels and restrictions, and at the same time has super aesthetic ability ... But among all the qualities, what attracts me most is that she always dares to follow her "emotional line", go out of her comfort zone, think deeply and do everything with the ultimate attitude and ability.
There is a sentence at the beginning of the book: "You just need to follow the emotional line in your palm." This is a lyric. This "emotional line" is not affection, love and friendship, but intuition, passion and mission. Is to keep asking yourself: what do you really care about? What are your values? What kind of talent or talent do you want to contribute? It is the key to our inner motivation and the centripetal force to return to the right path when we are lost.
Maureen's road to becoming CEO of Chanel did not begin with her passion for fashion or business, but her passion for goat cheese. Maureen, born in America, was on vacation in Provence when she was 16 years old. When she first tasted French goat cheese, she fell in love with the strong, spicy and wonderful taste. At the same time, she deeply fell in love with France and liked the French attitude towards beauty and freedom. This love pushed her and encouraged her to try to return to France and experience everything here. That's why she went to live in a stranger's house in France alone, and went to France to study at the end of the university. These experiences made her familiar with France and French culture, which became the premise for Chanel to list her as a CEO candidate later.
During Chanel's one-and-a-half-year interview, other companies offered her an olive branch and even offered her more attractive salary, but she still insisted on her inner choice. She thinks salary, title and place of work are very important in choosing a job, but there are also some soft factors, such as company culture, your relationship with your new boss and colleagues. Only by following one's own emotional line, returning to intuition and listening to one's inner voice can one make a better choice. She believes that her unexpected career success stems from following the guidance of feelings and instincts.
Even if Maureen thinks that "deliberately seeking excitement" is not her character, even if breaking through the comfort zone will make her feel uneasy, she still bravely walks out of the comfort zone again and again to accept greater challenges, and the driving force behind this is strong curiosity.
The first time she walked out of her comfort zone was in the summer vacation of high school, leaving her familiar hometown of St. Louis, USA, and staying at a stranger's house in the south of France. Here, she once again enjoys the delicious goat cheese, only speaks French from the English environment, and is completely immersed in the strange French region and culture. This trip to France has completely awakened her feelings, so that she can always exert her keen sensibility and make effective choices with excellent aesthetic ability in future important work and occasions.
The second time out of the comfort zone is to join Gap company. I thought that with my working experience and training in the top company L 'Oreal, I should be able to get the title of senior employee, but I didn't expect it to be a position of socks and belt manager. She finally accepted the arrangement. She has done every little job well since she tidied up the sample cabinet. Finally, from conquering the sample cabinet, fixing the purchase quota plan, to being familiar with the production process, she grew into an excellent "assistant businessman of socks and belts", and then gradually became the president of Banana * * * and China District of Gap Branch. She regards this experience as the best fifteen years in her life.
The third time I walked out of my comfort zone was to accept a job offer from Chanel. To this end, she must give up her former CEO status, learn from scratch, adapt to the transformation from "mass industry to luxury industry", receive three years of training and truly become a global CEO. In the first year, she deeply studied the history and culture of Chanel, and in the next two years, she served as the CEO of Chanel in the United States for "field" training. This experience laid a solid foundation for her to become a global CEO and balance Chanel's brand development between tradition and modernity.
Walking out of the comfort zone is painful, but after the pain, you will definitely taste the richness and sweetness of the fruit.
Every time she does something, she will seriously think about the logic behind it, look for deep meaning, not be bound by labels, and strive to achieve the ultimate.
In college, Maureen, who studied liberal arts at Yale University, took the course "Introduction to French New Wave Movies" out of her love for France and French. After in-depth study, she found that movies are actually texts. Movies convey their ideas to the audience through symbols composed of sound, image, music and other elements. Audiences understand movies by understanding these symbols, just as they understand literary works by reading words. She tries to understand how images and words interact with each other, which leads to the audience's specific emotions about the film, and why each audience interprets the film so differently. Through the analysis and thinking of deconstruction, she realized that the audience's angle of experiencing art works is unpredictable, and they will create their own meaning from the text. Such thinking and awareness influenced her future views on advertising, products, business strategies and leadership, enabling her to observe the world from the perspective of the audience and pay attention to herself and secular prejudice.
After joining Chanel, she needs to grasp the brand development direction of Chanel. On the one hand, Chanel is traditional and has rich historical and cultural heritage. It employs craftsmen to embroider complex patterns by hand and carve unique jewels. On the other hand, it is modernization, with very advanced high-tech production technology. How to balance tradition and modernity will determine whether the company can succeed in the challenge of the new era.
Maureen first relied on intuition to break through the traditional label restrictions, and chose an almost "unknown" 19-year-old new female star-keira knightley to take over the advertising endorsement of gabrielle bonheur Chanel perfume. Gabrielle bonheur Chanel perfume symbolizes the moment when young women move towards independence. Intuition tells her that this girl is a modern version of Gabrielle Chanel. They also have perseverance and tenacity, dare to break away from convention, and show the same independence and confidence in two different times. This choice finally achieved great success. Gabrielle bonheur Chanel perfume developed rapidly and soon occupied the largest market share in the world.
Maureen's leadership style in Chanel has also subverted the label of traditional CEO. She respects different voices, modifies the form of regular meetings, encourages key talents to enter new fields, supports employees to develop new skills, and combines employees' talents, passion and sense of purpose. Together with the executive team, she designed and launched the "Initiative and Conscious Leadership Journey" project, requiring leaders to have self-awareness, constantly improve and improve themselves and become their own leaders; Secondly, we should observe ourselves and reflect on how to become a leader in the "external" world. We should not only listen to ourselves, but also listen to others. We should be clear about our business department and adapt to the development of the whole world, and make continuous progress with insatiable curiosity and the spirit of asking questions. This project lasted for three years and expanded to hundreds of Chanel leaders around the world, and continued as a company tradition, affecting countless people.
Maureen's life has a kind of contradictory beauty. As she said, "I am not good at how to achieve my goal, but I can adopt an artist's vision, which makes me break away from convention and stand out." I can control different fields and viewpoints and switch back and forth freely between the marketing world and the creative world, the rational world and the perceptual world. "Perhaps because of her super sensibility and excellent aesthetic ability, she can fully feel and accept the" contradictions "and" paradoxes "that others think, embrace all contradictions in her own way, and realize the perfect integration and free switching between contradictions.
Maureen's success is simple. She firmly followed the guidance of her inner intuition and went forward towards her passion and love without hesitation. She didn't learn much skills or methodology, so she can concentrate, concentrate, practice deep thinking and integrate what she has learned, thought and thought into other fields everywhere she lived, from everyone she met, from everything she was interested in, or from every job she did.
Therefore, her success is inevitable. In the direction of her extreme love, she practiced extreme deep thinking and made every tiny and humble work to the extreme. In the end, fate brought her to the place where she could shine the most. Although at first, she didn't know where it would be.
She told us with experience that every step of life is meaningful, everything we do is meaningful, and every success we have achieved is traceable. If it is difficult to expand the periphery of life and meet a bigger world because of objective factors, then we can completely base ourselves on this moment and expand the width of life with the depth of thinking, so as to embark on a bigger stage of life.