Banking is like Formula One rating...'
talking heads
Alain Younes, 48, appointed managing board member and responsible for
global administration on 1 January, 1999, is committed to making the best
from diversity and change.
What'sNewS Issue
6'June 1999
Lebanese-born and French-educated,
he is the product of an entre-
preneurial family with a long tradition of
international business experience. I le
shows a cosmopolitan respect for the
integrity of other people and cultures,
and his powerful business inclination is
driven by a fascination with 'the process
of creating value and wealth. It has
always been in my bones.'
After studies at the Ecole
Nationale Superieure des
Telecommunications in Paris
which produced an engineering
degree, concurrent with
business studies at Paris IX
(Dauphine) which led to an
MBA, Younes hrought his
combined information
technology (IT) and business
training to bear in the private
sector. 'I happened to have a
love for science and techno
logy. But I also had this natural
inclination towards commerce
and a fascination with people.
As it happened, IT proved to
be a good way to marry the
two. I belong to the school of
thought which considers
technology a means to an end, not just
an end in itself.'
Beneath his soft spoken and mild
mannered exterior - Younes is modest and
displays a certain reluctance to advertise
his various professional accomplishments
- one senses a strong sense of purpose. He
has a powerful respect for the challenges
inherent in managing people through a
phase of organizational change. Indeed,
all of his previous professional incar-
nations, which began at Renault and
included stints at Banque Paribas in Paris
(where he spent a total of 12 years), as
well as Bankers Trust and JP Morgan in
London, involved electronieally net-
working large organizations and, as such,
inevitably made him a catalyst for such
change. This taught important lessons.
'Technology is only an enabler - a tooi,'
he says. 'When you talk about change.
you're automatically talking about people.
You have to work through people and
with people to reach your objectives.
Almost always there is initial resistance to
change - and that's natural. But I have
always feit that accommodating change
and transformation is very much like
travel. To do it well, you have to be open
and adaptable. You need to recognize that
difference - a shift from the status quo
can be a good thing. You have to accept
Younes invites diversity
and understand the diversity of people
and business cultures, be capable of inte-
grating their positive aspects, and lever-
age these to the benefit of the business as
a whole. This is what makes transfor
mation, like travel, worrhwhile.'
At Rabobank, this process of leveragitig
our diverse strengths of tradition,
organization, culture, and geography into
a strong and efficiënt whole is a migration
in its own right. 'We need to focus our
energy better,' Younes insists. 'Rabobank
and the Dutch business culture as a whole
have a long history of success. But
Rabobank International is now a much
more international organization and we
want to mold its multiple strengths into a
coherent, cosmopolitan culture that can
focus its energy as a single entity, not a
collection of isolated islands.' Indeed, he
says, 'this is the greatest single challenge
we face. We're trying to come up from
behind in a global race. To do this, we
have to use all our strengths and we
cannot afford to waste anything. If some
product or service or system was invented
elsewhere in the network, that doesn't
rnean it can't he applied in your own
backyard. We operate in the same uni-
verse at the end of the day.'
Being a careful listener himself, Younes
believes the Dutch tradition of discussion
and consensus-building to be an essential
strength in the development of our
cooperative organization to date. At the
same time, he is acutely mindful of the
need to provide administrative leadership
and direction. 'I listen
to people's opinions.
Their input and
participation is crucial
- it's not my style to say
there's just one way,
which is mine. But
when it comes to global
administration, we need
to act more quickly. To
adapt to the competi-
tive realities, we have to
become not only more
efficiënt but more
decisive as well. We're
trying to engineer a
major restructuring of
our organization as
well as our technical
infrastructure in the
middle of a global commercial war. The
competition out there is intense. People
have to take global responsibility and be
held globally accountable for the tasks
they own and take final decisions - that
goes for me just as it does for everyone
else in the bank.'
As Younes told his network of IT
professionals recently, banking is like
Formula One racing. 'They are both
about speed and precision; competing
with professionals for high stakes;
encountering dangerous curves and hitting
the right balanee of speed and agility to
deal with them adequately; and about
tight teamwork and quality behind-the-
scene support. 1 ike a Formula One team^fc
we too need to be capable of reinventing
ourselves, of handling uncertainty, of
picking ourselves up after a crash and
starting all over again.'
