CONTINUING A LEGACY
INTRODUCTION
Jean-Marc Gallot joined Veuve Clicquot in 2014. An elegant, friendly, even humorous man with a long experience in luxury, he explains with great enthusiasm how Veuve Clicquot’s maverick spirit remains at the heart of the identity of the house. This, combined with its long history, results in a mix of innovation and tradition, expressed in everything the house does. Gallot truly understands what an identity is, having previously headed several global luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, together with a strong understanding of champagne, having managed another great Champagne house–Ruinart. This is why this interview is not only a way to understand this house and the spirit that its wines convey, but also a priceless piece of advice on how to build a world around your brand.
Before joining Veuve Clicquot, you managed Ruinart, another iconic house, and other luxury brands part of LVMH. To you, what does a bottle of champagne represent?
For me, a bottle of champagne is, first and foremost, the idea of sharing.
When I joined Ruinart in 2009, I discovered the world of champagne, a new universe for me, although I had previous experiences in the luxury world at Cartier, Christofle, Ferragamo, and Louis Vuitton. I previously enjoyed champagne from the outside, but once inside, I had to understand what is at the heart and soul of our house. For me, a bottle of champagne is, first and foremost, the idea of sharing. Sharing the experience of the wine itself and its quality, but also sharing the outside, the bottle and what it represents, which brings people having this experience together. This is the complexity of champagne, and at Veuve Clicquot we aim at this double experience.
How do you build the “outside” experience to which you refer?
You build it with the DNA of your brand: where you come from and what you are, your mission and the storytelling that you are able to develop.
Veuve Clicquot is all about mixing tradition and innovation.
On top of that, innovation is a key element. Veuve Clicquot is all about mixing tradition and innovation. Tradition is Madame Clicquot, it’s the quality of the wine, “Only one quality, the finest,” and innovation is the creativity and audacity of the things we develop, like our Rich champagne, made to be drunk on ice with cocktail ingredients like cucumber, lime, etc.
In 2017, we introduced Extra Brut Extra Old, a champagne made 100% of reserve wines, from 1988 to 2010. Yellow Label already includes 35% to 40% reserve wines, so with this new cuvée, we want to create the ultimate experience of Yellow Label. To visually express this twist on the bottle, we inverted the use of the colors on the label that is black written on yellow for this new champagne. The label is also turned upside down, from horizontal to vertical, like in still wines.
But innovation is also in the way you express your story. Veuve Clicquot brings to the champagne world the idea of being definitely singular, different, unpredictably mixing tradition and innovation. This is the expertise and the signature of Veuve Clicquot. We live in an ever-changing world, and for us it is a matter of moving forward, always. This is why every two years, we introduce new collections of gift boxes, always consistent with the DNA of our house and the spirit of Madame Clicquot which truly makes us different.
What is Madame Clicquot’s spirit all about?
It is innovation without limits. In the first five years that she joined the house, she invented the riddling table, she introduced the first vintage champagne and the rosé d’assemblage method. These were breakthroughs in champagne making that were soon adopted by all the other houses. This is why, still today, we love to be different.
How do you constantly innovate without damaging your brand?
We have a guardian of the temple, our Chef de Cave Dominique Demarville, meaning that any innovation in the winemaking has to be validated by him. We also have a committee, and if we feel that we are going against the spirit of Madame Clicquot, we won’t do it; we have to be always consistent with our origins.
Through this permanent reference to Madame Clicquot, isn’t there a risk of being too feminine?
I don’t think so; our target is as much masculine as feminine. It is true that with the Veuve Clicquot Business Women Award, we recognize women entrepreneurship, the audacity, and the resilience that characterized Madame Clicquot when she became the first woman to take over a Champagne house at 27. But at the same time, our wines are dominated by the presence of pinot noir, which brings a certain power to champagne.
As the second-largest Champagne house, you are leading the way in the future of your industry. How do you see it? Is the profile of the champagne consumer changing?
We are an integral part of the champagne industry and have great respect for our competitors and wish them all the best, as long as we do better than them (chuckle).
It is very difficult to define a specific target or consumer profile. We have many faithful customers who have been drinking champagne forever and will continue to do so, we believe. However, there could be the risk of an aging customer base, combined with the excitement for spirits and other drinks.
Champagne houses not only must maintain their superior quality but also develop it further.
This is why Champagne houses not only must maintain their superior quality but also develop it further. For example, our Yellow Label now ages on lees in the cellars for a minimum of three years, when the law requires a minimum of 15 months. Our industry is also progressively moving toward more sustainable viticulture.
We should also ensure that champagne maintains its luxury status, by getting rid of extremely aggressive promotions implemented by some producers that result in champagne sold in supermarkets for less than 15 euro. This is killing the idea of quality and luxury that champagne conveys.
The general focus nowadays is on millennials, but this is limiting I think because anybody has the potential to drink champagne, and not only through celebratory moments like weddings or anniversaries. The cornerstone of our business is being present in bars, lounges, restaurants, nightclubs sometimes, where there are moments of sharing. But to get new customers, we have to create new opportunities where we can meet them; we must bring our experience in creating new moments. For example, we created the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic in New York that attracts close to 10,000 people. This is a great way to let new people join the world of Veuve Clicquot.
Then, we have to make sure that consumers keep the excitement. For example, our new extra brut Extra Old champagne is a very good alternative for those who are keen on champagne from growers. Its production and distribution are limited, and it can only be found in certain wine merchants and restaurants. So, even if we are a large house, sometimes we have to do more intimate things.
How do you see the increasing competition of Prosecco and other sparkling wines?
I respect very much Prosecco and the other sparkling wines, but I don’t believe we are in the same world as champagne. They do not have as much history and creativity. As long as we have this competitive edge, I have good faith in the future of Veuve Clicquot.
How do you feel being the president of a brand that is renowned globally?
My job is to create the conditions for the creative director, in our case our chef de cave, to create everything he likes.
In our group, everything is about creativity; who is the president of a maison is not important. My job is to create the conditions for the creative director, in our case our chef de cave, to create everything he likes. Sometimes, my job is also to redirect him in what he does to make sure that it is feasible and sellable. But we also like to take some bold decisions for the benefit of our future.
What does champagne mean to you?
Champagne is for me a way to create an experience. My favorite moment is on the weekend with my family when all my children are around (they are all of legal drinking age) and we open a bottle of champagne. Champagne brings joy to life and makes the moment different.
https://www.bestchampagne.net/interviews/jean-marc-gallot-veuve-clicquot/
As a leader, leaving a great legacy is arguably the most powerful thing you can do in your career and life because it enables you to have influence well into the future – even after you are out of the picture yourself. It’s key to optimizing your impact on your organization and its people.
Legacy building
in business contexts can take the
form of working to ensure the long-term viability of the organization and leaving it stronger, more productive,
and more valuable than it was
before. Or, in more dramatic scenarios led by entrepreneurs, creating an entirely new organization.
Thinking about your legacy is also a great
way to ensure that you are taking into account
the long-term perspective of your organization and resisting the temptation to make myopic decisions that are
overly focused on short-term gain.
So then,
how can you keep your legacy in mind as you go about your everyday decisions? Fortunately, more than a decade of
research on how people make decisions
that involve future generations provides some
specific strategies for helping you to keep legacy building in mind and leverage those thoughts to maximize your
impact on the world.
Think
about what the previous generation did for you
Recall your predecessors and how their actions affected you. What resources did they leave behind for you and your contemporaries? How did they change the organization to provide you with opportunities? How did they shape your organization’s culture? While you can’t always reciprocate the deeds of prior generations because they are no longer part of the organization, you can pay it forward by behaving similarly to the next generation of organizational actors. When you take the long-term perspective and think about your organization in terms of multiple generations, reciprocity is not direct, but rather it takes on a more generalized form. Research shows that when we know we have benefited from the legacy of the prior generation, that gets us thinking about the positive legacy we want to leave for future generations and we tend to make better long-term oriented decisions.
Focus on the burdens rather than the benefits
When making decisions about the future, leaders may be allocating desirable benefits such as profit or natural resources or they may be distributing burdens that they and others wish to avoid such as debt or hazardous waste. Research shows that whether a resource is a benefit or a burden matters when it comes to allocation decisions and legacies. People are more concerned with avoiding leaving a negative legacy than with creating a positive one. Compared to leaving benefits to future others, leaving burdens leads individuals to feel a greater sense of responsibility toward and affinity with those in the future as well as more moral emotions, such as shame and guilt.
Highlighting
the burdensome aspects of long-range decisions can help leaders to recognize the negative legacies that
such decisions can create. Further, it is
strategic for organizations to intentionally connect decisions about benefits and burdens so that
managers must make them simultaneously.
The increased focus on ethical considerations
that accompanies the allocation of burdens can help attenuate the short-sighted and self-interested
behavior that often guides
the allocation of benefits.
Consider
the responsibility that comes with your power
Most research on power suggests that the experience of power tends to make people more self-focused and self-interested. This research primarily considers the effect of power in limited timeframes. However, recent research on intergenerational decisions involving longer timeframes reveals that power can lead decision makers to be more concerned with the interests of others in the future.
When intergenerational decisions are combined with an enhanced experience of power, people feel more social responsibility and are more focused on their legacy, compared to when their power is not prominent. The result is that they are more generous to future generations, which naturally helps them to build a positive legacy.
When it is clear that we are in a position to determine outcomes to powerless and voiceless others, our decisions are ethically charged and we consider the moral implications of our actions more seriously.
Remember
that you will die some day
One day in 1888, a wealthy and successful man was reading what was supposed to be his brother’s obituary in a French newspaper. As he read, he realized that the editor had confused the two brothers and had written an obituary for him instead. The headline proclaimed, “The merchant of death is dead,” and then described a man who had gained his wealth by helping people to kill one another. Not surprisingly, he was deeply troubled by this glimpse of what his legacy might have been had he actually died on that day. It is believed that this incident was pivotal in motivating him to leave nearly his entire fortune following his actual death eight years later to fund awards each year to give to those whose work most benefitted humanity. This is, of course, the true story of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize.
Yes, we all die. When we are reminded of our deaths, we remember that we don’t want to die – we want to live! But we understand death’s inevitability and that fact creates an existential dilemma in light of our deeply rooted survival instinct. One of the most effective things we can do to buffer our anxiety about death is to attempt to transcend death by finding meaning in our lives. Central to this meaning is that we have impact that persists beyond our physical existence.
Research shows that reminding people of death motivates them to consider their legacy and causes them to act in ways that benefit future generations, thus improving the overall quality of their long-term decisions. People feel better in the face of death if they are a part of something that will live on after them. Having a positive impact on future generations can help fulfill that need. Nobel lives on through his legacy, and receiving a shocking reminder of the inevitability of hisdeath helped him to get there. His story also illustrates how avoiding a negative legacy can be more motivating than simply wanting to build a positive one.
In sum, the epitome of power is to leave a great legacy that lives on after you are gone. This is the way you can maximize your influence and ensure you are keeping the long-term success of the organization in mind. And as a bonus you get a little bit of (symbolic) immortality.
Ultimately, your legacy is all you’ve got. Think about how you want to be remembered by other people and act on those thoughts. Give the Grim Reaper a run for his money by creating something meaningful that will outlive yourself.
When we speak to CEOs who are new to their role, they invariably talk about their legacy. How can they build the kind of advantage that will allow their company to thrive for decades? How thoroughly must they transform the company to make this happen? How will they develop the next generation of leaders, and groom them for challenges that can’t yet be imagined?
All too soon, however, the demands of managing the near-term business take over. Many CEOs put legacy issues on hold, and concentrate instead on making their quarterly growth targets.
This generally means doing whatever needs to be done to meet the most urgent, immediate demands at any given moment. Perhaps that’s why half the respondents to a recent survey we conducted of senior executives said that setting a clear and differentiating strategy was “a significant challenge.”
The surest way to build a company whose leadership will outlast your own is to focus your attention on the few essential things that your company can do better than anyone else. If you can reinforce that focus in every decision you make — from mergers & acquisitions to new product launch to budgeting or cutting costs — it can help you win market share, generate sustainable growth, or even turn around a decline.
This probably doesn’t mean continuing the things you have done in the past; “sticking to your knitting,” in itself, is not enough. And you certainly can’t do it by just watching and copying your competition; sources of greatness are different for different companies, even within the same industry. Developing a legacy-building strategy means looking directly for the sources of your greatest potential: where you are already uniquely great, and where your most significant customers need you to be great — and then ruthlessly concentrating your attention and your investment in those areas. It is your legacy you’re looking for; a generic or tradition-bound view of success won’t suffice.
When A.G. Lafley became the CEO of Procter & Gamble, he saw that the company’s current expansion strategy, which had put it in markets as diverse as pharmaceuticals and snack foods, would continue to erode value. He pared back the product portfolio to those that fit with P&G’s well-established capabilities system: world-class branding, global sales and merchandising, and rapid technological innovation, all for particular types of life-enhancing consumer products. The result: he created a high-performance packaged-goods machine that lined up perfectly behind brands like Crest, Tide, and Pampers, and turned in industry-leading financial results.
We have a name for this sort of legacy-building strategy. It’s “strategic coherence.” This means having a single compelling view of how your company should create value in the market, the capabilities required to do so, the way those capabilities fit together as a system, and the way that all of these relate to all your products and services. This is the only strategy we know that consistently enables companies to create value today, while building a legacy of greater value for the future.
If you are a new CEO or other senior executive leader, strategic coherence is an accessible path for you and your company. You will have to devote time right from the start, to research, understand and make choices about your capabilities and portfolio. You will have to learn to say “no” a lot more than your predecessor probably did. Virtually all decisions — from new markets, to product launches, to acquisitions, to R&D investment, to hiring, or cost cutting — must henceforth reinforce your company’s distinctive ambition. It is no small challenge to shut down or turn down a wide range of initiatives that your executive team and employees feel passionately about. But the rewards are profound. Once you set out on a coherent course, the people in your organization will rapidly come to understand what creates value and what does not. They will see how their role fits with the overall purpose of your company, and what they must do to contribute to building your company’s legacy. This is in their interest as well.
We know a growing number of CEOs who have embarked on this journey, and they often talk about the limited number of new and random requests they get, rather than the continuous pummeling of requests from functions and businesses with the next great budget request.
To get to coherence, and help the entire organization live coherence every day, we encourage you to focus on three key strategic questions:
- Is my team focused on a core strategic approach to the market that is differentiated from our competitors — do we have a unique “way to play”?
- Can my team articulate the three to six capabilities that describe what we do uniquely better than anyone else and how these capabilities support our value proposition?
- Are we focused strategically on markets where we can compete effectively? Or are we chasing adjacent markets where our capabilities don’t fit?
If you can get your company focused on these three key drivers of coherence, it will take you a long way toward a lasting legacy of success. In the short run, you’ll see better financials. In the end, you will leave behind a stronger organization with the skills, insight, and discipline to sustain that success — even after you’ve gone. You will have truly lifted your organization up and set it apart from the competition, and that legacy can make every leader proud.
Do you agree with the idea of building, continuing and leaving a legacy in business? Why (not)?
Do only some business leaders who are able to „see a bigger picture“ build and leave a legacy or can (should) also a common man do so? If yes, how?
Make a presentation on „Legacy“ and add more examples of (business) people representing the worldview of the „Continuum“ and „passing on the baton“.
The usual meaning of the word continuous is “unbroken” or “uninterrupted”: thus a continuous entity—a continuum—has no “gaps.” We commonly suppose that space and time are continuous, and certain philosophers have maintained that all natural processes occur continuously: witness, for example, Leibniz’s famous apothegm natura non facit saltus—“nature makes no jump.”
In philosophical terms the question is if all endeavours of a (business) man in his lifetime have meaning.
The purpose of this project is indeed to encourage philosophical thinking.
