Over the 20 years of my career at SITA (1981-2001) I never directly reported to Claude Lalanne and therefore cannot say that I knew him particularly well. I had, nevertheless, at several time the opportunity for fruitful face-to-face meetings with him, which allowed me to fully appreciate his quality of judgment and his strong leadership.
To illustrate this, l would like to recall two of these meetings that participated to some major successes that characterized SITA of the 90’s, that is a booming of our traditional air transport oriented telecom activities, as well as a larger offer of services, allowing us, by taking advantage of our unique seamless worldwide coverage, to create EQUANT and widely enlarge our business.
The first meeting took place in 1988 at Sophia Antipolis when, assisted by Jean-Michel Kaliszewski and a little group of young and brilliant engineers, coming from various SITA’s entities or specially hired for that purpose, I was in charge of a newly created R&D Department*. A Department essentially devoted at defining the specifications and runing the tender of the so-called MTN Network, aimed at satisfying our requirements for the 90’s and finally appreciate the adequacy of the various offers received, in order to be able to propose a short list of two providers for the final choice to be made by SITA’s top management.
It happened that before reaching that point I was submitted to pressures aimed at introducing UNISYS, the existing provider of the current DTN Network, in the short list, while its offer did not at all meet our requirements. For the team and myself that was of course unacceptable and led me to solicit an urgent meeting with Claude Lalanne. The meeting took place in face to face, shortly after. Claude Lalanne scrutinized and listened very carefully to me, before concluding by saying:”SITA is not married to UNISYS” and so, providing us with a greenlight for freely pursuing our task as planned.
I was appointed in the early 90’s as head of the “Network Planing and Technical Support Department,” (PAREN) who became, shortly after, part of the SITA/EQUANT Joint Venture, headed by Jean-Pierre Gaudard.This Department was constituted of a mix of old briscards very knowledgable of the field constraints and newly appointed talented,young engineers, well familiar with the latest technologies. It worked at full speed and in close relation with the DN’s located in the regions, to manage at best of availability, quality and cost, the booming SITA and EQUANT customer requirements and also provide a presale technical support especially required for our newly introduced services or for complex bids, like those for outsourcing.
The second important face-to-face meeting I had with Claude Lalanne, took place in this context.It happened at the time that our weakest network coverage was North America, a territory dominated by ARINC, our main competitor in regards to the Air transport industry. We knew that a priority objective set by Claude Lalanne, was to correct that aberration and an opportunity for reaching that goal, with PAREN on the front line, was offered by American Airline when it decided in the mid 90’s to call for tender for the outsourcing of its huge SABRE Network. So the first thing I did was to meet in ATL, the AA executives in charge. My goal was to obtain from them an understanding of their main expectations, in order to orient our proposal accordingly and maximize our chances to win the bid. I was lucky enough to reach my goal. Reaching an attractive price was not a difficulty, thanks to expected economies of scale resulting of a huge reshuffling of thousands of terminals, located all over NAM. An exercice that was familiar to us.In turn, to meet AA main requirement, we would have to derogate to a, so far, unchanging billing principle at SITA. Would we be ready to derogate in order to meet AA expectations? That was the question, question I asked to Claude Lalanne who happened to be on talk with Didier Delepine in ATL, and provided me immediately with his consent.
Back to PAR, the next day, I asked Thierry Langlais, who assisted me at the head of the Department, to prepare the corresponding business plan and proposal. He did a fantastic job and do You know what? We won the bid. I later learned in confidence, that AA had been very surprised that an old lady like SITA was able to demonstrate such flexibility as it did. the way the reshuffling project was later on performed by SITA, is a totally different story.
*Further to a McKinsey recommendation. While there is some truth in saying that a consulting company is a company who, when you give her your watch, then tells you the time, one must recognize that in our case McKinsey did, each time they were called by SITA, an excellent job, and we wouldnt have lived the major changes we got at different stages, especially in the 90’s, without their interventions. I dont know if we have rather to thank Claude Lalanne or the board members for bringing McKinsey in the loop, but yes, that was definitely each time a good decision taken.
