Ex-Renault boss chimes perfectly with the values of the two brands he seeks to reinvent.
It’s hard to think how Thierry Bolloré could have made a better job of his first public outing as Jaguar Land Rover’s new boss
Far from coming across as the austere, crop-headed and cagey business professional of his early publicity photographs, he was enthusiastic, calm, quick to smile, and happy to give good-natured answers even to sometimes-trite questions. Above all, he seemed full of energy and well prepared for the challenges to come.
As befits someone who’s had nearly six months to finesse his all-encompassing transformation plans, Bollore seemed very secure with the details and disarmingly keen, even impatient, to impart what he must have known would be seen as fundamentally good news (expansion not shrinkage, generous investment, new forays into high technology, new freedom for JLR’s company’s engineers and designers).
He revealed that even at the job interview stage, he had “shared several dreams” with the company officials who subsequently gave him the job — and hinted that some of the dreams were now part of the plan.
Interestingly, his appearance chimed very well with the straightforward approach to re-thinking the two brands he espouses: a well-cut but conservative navy suit and tie, a white shirt, simple cufflinks, even a white-faced watch with numerals so clear you could read them off the Zoom screen. No hand tremors or beads of sweat. Just plausibility to burn.
When asked for details about why the job appealed to him, Bolloré said just enough about the personal challenge of running two extraordinary brands (“this is an everlasting dream; how could anyone say no?”) to make it seem more like a personal mission rather than a mere professional task. It was nicely judged.
As Bolloré acknowledged, there is now an enormous amount to be done in a scarily short time. Moving on from the successful but eventful Ralf Speth decade, especially with the Covid year to provide a further stark divide, was always going to seem to make the 2020s seem an entirely new era. But with Bollore’s presentation the sheer scale of that newness was even more dramatically portrayed than expected.
Judging by his initial performance, the new CEO looks, so far, to be very much the man for the job.
Steve Cropley