A builder of systems.

I began in research. A mechanical engineer by training, I wrote an industrial doctorate on Industry 4.0 in small and mid-sized manufacturers — not in an isolated laboratory, but in contact with the workshops, deploying what I was studying. My examiners summed up in a single sentence what I have been trying to do ever since: to bridge industry and research.

I could have stayed on the side of ideas. I chose the field. Eight years in an international industrial group, from industrialisation through to production management. Transformations that can be measured: on my first line, as master planner, on-time delivery went from 45% to 100% in six months; another line, which I ran, gained €350k of margin in six months; a “tiger team” cut group inventory by 8% in four months. That is where I learned the lesson that governs all the rest: problems rarely come from a lack of intelligence in individuals; they come from badly designed systems. Bad organisations, bad incentives, decisions taken on intuition when the data already exists.

Two modes, one discipline

I work in alternation. Exploration first: reading widely — philosophy, AI, economics, history, industry —, debating, questioning. Then execution: once the direction is set, moving fast, and expecting the same commitment from everyone else. What exhausts me is not difficulty, it is stagnation. I would rather have an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable consensus.

Technique alone is never enough

People take me for someone obsessed with systems; I am. But a system exists only through the women and men who make it run. The finest software architecture is worth nothing if it strips responsibility from the very technician it was meant to serve. That is why I design tools for the people of the trade — to make the craftsman more effective, never to replace them with a procedure.

Today

I acquire and transform companies. With my brother Mikhael, my partner, we take over and transform industrial SMEs within 2M Technologies. He holds the workshop and the machines; I hold the system and the strategy.

School had filed Mikhael away. “You will end up sleeping under a bridge” — that is what his teachers promised him. He took the vocational track, then went to learn where it really counts: in the field, hands inside the machines. Fifteen years on, he is an indispensable expert and a team leader nobody argues with. The institution that graded him had judged him to have no future; the workshop revealed everything it had failed to see.

His story states, in miniature, my whole conviction: talent is almost never what is missing — it is the systems that fail to see it. Together we bring back together the two halves that are too often kept apart: the field and the strategy, the workshop and the new technologies. Not to build a unicorn, but to build a lasting industrial group — technically excellent companies that share their systems, their methods and their AI without losing any of their closeness to the people they serve.

At bottom, a single thread connects the ERP work, the acquisitions, the AI and the thinking I publish here: building systems in which technology durably augments human judgement, so as to turn ordinary companies into organisations of excellence — and to contribute, at my own scale, to rebuilding France's industrial base.

The career in detail →