To the attention of :
Their Majesties King Philippe and Queen Mathilde
Majesties,
The other time I got fired, after passing through the ordeal at KPN-Orange, was at Ariane II, a French software-consulting group where I worked as a quality project leader in a team responsible for the ISO certification of the group and for the re-work of a new service.
The owners of the group, were husband and wife, and they were respectively CEO and HR director. None of them had a software background, which I found highly remarkable and a very courageous direction for the owners. Technology is something you have to dare entering, just like travelling to space with a rocket and hoping to come back alive. I was admiring the owners of Ariane II for taking a dive in the ocean of technology.
There was a good thing about Ariane II which encouraged me to work for the company, which is that they were recruiting an awful lot of Moroccan people, which gave a slight impression of diversity. I later on learned that the owner was born in Fez, Morocco, and that he loved being around the Moroccan culture all the time. Yet, he could have done something about the standards in his organisation, if the intention was to pull up the Moroccan people in the Technology sector.
As soon as I started in that company, I immediately noticed the shortcomings and I supplied corrections where I could. The bosses were happy. They were seeking to simplify the software development cycle for their clients. One of their clients was KPN-Orange, where I learned about Ariane II.
They also needed to work out a faster recruitment procedure for training and employing many consultants on board of their company. They were doing good work like applying for government subsidies to recruit people who were out of work for more than two years. I think it was the Plan Rosetta for which the HR department was filling out the requirements for the Brussels region and the Flemish region.
Though, there was far too much work for re-structuring the whole thing to qualify for the ISO certification, even with all the means that I was given to grow the team further. Ariane II was a heavy monster that probably grew unstructured from the beginnings and became a time-consuming and money-hungry beast. The beast was obviously able to run during the good times. The bosses apparently knew that too, but they only decided to intervene when it was too late.
9/11 hit the planet. A couple of weeks after the event, the software business began to experience a slowdown. Industries were cutting costs and consultants were the first to go, like usual. My team of previously six people, got reduced to two people, myself included.
Then the beast started to hobble. It wasn’t light enough to adjust to the new reality of the economy. The owners decided to sell the entire group of companies and quickly found a buyer.
When the news broke, the first thing that had hit me was that this company was turned in less than two years time from four original business units into a group of seventeen subsidiaries.
It was originally a family-owned business and then it became a stock quoted company on Euronext and they achieved the creation of the group like this. It was the most rapidly growing software consulting company in the whole of Europe. For a while, Ariane II became a stock market index for the information technology sector on Euronext Brussels.
In 1999, the CEO was even elected “Manager of the Year” by a Belgian business magazine. Yet, he and his wife were already looking to sell the group hardly 18 months after the acquisitions of 13 new subsidiaries.
As a quality controller, I was not impressed by this publicly well reputed company. I judged that there were only three of the seventeen branches that were performing to standards and that all the other branches, especially the ones they bought from others, were undiluted garbage.
So, I recommended to the board to narrow down the scope of ISO certification to the three best branches, one in Brussels, one in Paris and one in Luxembourg. These branches obviously had the best portfolio of clients. The rest of the group was not certifiable, and thus not sellable.
The meeting escalated between the board and me. “You can’t talk like that about our company”, the owners said. “Of course I can, you hired me for the quality, not for the quantity!” I replied. They were looking at the size. I was looking up against travelling just me with another consultant to ISO certify fourteen branches of which the majority was in the arrogant country called France.
I was also looking up against going to conferences about quality assurance in Wallonia, because I was not yet driving a car, and travelling by train in the evening to a region that I don’t know is out of the questions. My colleague, who was a Walloon, drove me to a Qualiwall conference where we met the Minister President of Wallonia of that time who was Mr Jean-Claude Van Cauwenberghe. Wallonia seems to have discovered “quality” in 2002. I didn’t speak to anybody simply because I didn’t know how to participate in their conversations, all the more that quality is a private industry matter in which the public authorities have no say in all aspects.
It was tense for weeks on end until the finance director advised the owners to shut down the unproductive branches with huge losses. He had the figures black on white. They were the same branches that I had indicated. Then the board changed its attitude towards me.
How did I know? Well, one explanation is that I was trained by corporate America and not by the French. Meanwhile, I thought about ways to allow the company to use one certificate for the whole group and I suggested that “perhaps through service contracts between the best and the weaker branches, the weaker branches can benefit from the certificate of the best branch.”
I advised them to accept 10 % of something, which is better than 100 % of nothing, and to save the cost of certification for the other branches, expensive as ISO certification it. The commercial director found the idea refreshing, he was happy for his branch (more clients). Only because he was happy, the owners decided to appreciate and support this idea and followed my advice, but they didn’t forget that I said their group was crap. So, they let the legal adviser sort out the contract aspect, and they let me get this ISO certification and embellished the bride with it.
In a private conversation, the finance director (a Belgian) expressed his sympathy for me, and his antipathy for the owners (French) whom he called “opportunists” and not real business people.
The technical director (a French), with whom I had an affinity because his wife is Algerian, once invited me in his office and made me giggle with his comic incidents he had with the CEO. He advised me that “if you have an argument with a colleague and you wish to see the CEO about it, don’t go first, make sure you go last… With him, it’s always the one who leaves his office last who is in the right.” He cautioned me that “the more you do good and sincere work, the more the CEO thinks that you do everything to make him look stupid… and especially because you are young woman”. I fell off my seat. The whole of France must be like this CEO.
The CEO couldn’t make me do worse. As soon as the ISO certification was done and delivered to his office in a golden frame by the accredited certifying company, I received my notice with immediate effect.
The finance director also received his notice the same day, but he had to stick around for another three months. All this because the buyer (also French software company) started an audit to assess the value of the group so he can be in a better position to negotiate with the sellers (owners).
While I was quietly packing up my stuff, the receptionist called me up to say that the buyer was in the reception area. “He came to do an audit”, she said. She ignored that I was fired. “Tell him to wait five minutes”, I said and hung up. I took the backdoor. Audits are never announced. The buyer was asking to get screwed, and I was glad that I was not part of that gigantic set up.
I was rolled myself a couple of months before I was fired. I didn’t receive my salary. Instead of paying me with money, they gave me 20 days of vacation. I sued them directly after getting fired. The dossier is available at Moureau-Jourdan Lawyers. I was up to here with getting fired in this country that i decided to never work for a Belgian employer again.
I do not remember the exact astronomic price that the owners asked for and received. What I do remember is what former colleagues told me some eight months later. The new owners began to find “dead bodies” in the drawers of the finance department, putrid litigation files that were still open in the legal department, spooky clients in the commercial department of some branches, and everything that made them realize that they were not only crooked, but firmly rolled. Rrrolled over back and forth in the flour like sausages.
There must be clients who simply got hooked
with the thought that they were dealing with
Ariane II the rocket
On the radio, I learned that the previous owner-CEO and former “Manager of the Year” got sued at criminal, civil and commercial court. He had to refund some 15 % of the sales value to the new owners, which probably corresponded with the original investment value of the group.
15 % is a lot if you asked for hundreds of millions of Euros. 15 % is the price of his arrogance. I would have asked for a 70 % of refund. He might as well have sold the business for one symbolic Euro. µ
As the wife had made a major investment in the (difficult) crystals industry with the money they earned from the company sale, they had no liquidity to pay the fines with. So, the husband, who had hoped to retire in the winery, found himself job hunting like a college graduate to pay the fines and began selling some of the real estate he had in the Provence (South of France). The former “Manager of the Year” is ruined. That is what you get when you play with other people’s belongings, be it money or projects.
The achievement that I am proud of is that the branches that I re-shaped and certified in the shortest time were bought over by Cap Gemini directly after the take-over and for a terribly good price. Cap Gemini is a prestigious French multinational consulting company. Some of the prestige they inherited from this Moroccan girl, who remained in the shadow.
Some of the setback has got to do with my femininity in 98.5 % male environments, where dismissals and non-recognition are simply part of the game. Even inside Europe it is still rare for women to apply for jobs in the technology sector, and most of the time it is because of fear of technology itself and also of male competition.
I went inside no matter what only for the knowledge. I went out to look and learn things with which I can push my country forward. I was not planning to keep working with people who understand five or ten years later what I am telling to them today. It was high time I took care of my own people’s prestige. What I am able to do for the French (like Ariane II) and the Dutch (like KPN-Orange), I better do for my country, and this is the original idea behind Aurum Helix.
Naima Mouali
President of United Chambers and Innovation Consultant
e-mail : unitedchambers@firemail.de
Phone:+ 1 541 366 4478
WhatsApp + 32 465 40 15 98
Twitter: @unitedchambers @meedanaltatweer
United Chambers of Commerce and Industry 