Jarre

[Interviewer] We are here at the home of Pietro Jarre to talk about the future of the professional services industry in the field of environmental engineering. Pietro has worked in this industry throughout his career: starting with a strong technical background, he quickly developed expertise in leadership roles, initially in Europe and then, on a global stage working with a fast growing employee-owned consultancy whose ownership quickly increased from a few hundred employees to many thousands. Pietro, you started from Europe in the late 1980s; what were the main challenges at that time? [Pietro Jarre] At that time, we were working mainly for North American multinationals. They were coming being perfectly aware of the cost, due to environmental compliance. In the countries they were investing in, instead, the environmental regulations were not developed yet and we had to do a huge work for reconciling this discrepancy, this gap. So our work was challenged by the fact that technical service was not enough. We had also to work on this cultural awareness. And, in doing so, it was quite exciting at that time, in doing so, we grew our consultancy from a few tens of people to almost a thousand, here in Europe. [interviewer] So, how would you define the challenges these days? Investors have often difficulty in seeing the real opportunities and the real risks when they invest in other countries. This is also due to the fact that they come with their models, to some extent, they come armed with models. I think you should keep with yourself when you go abroad. When you expand your enterprise you should only use your values and leave your models, due to your past experiences in other places, in other times, behind you. If you carry your values and, particularly, business ethics, you can succeed and even succeed in the longer term. Business ethics, to me, starts with technical quality. Technical quality and business ethics are two sides of the same coin in my experience. [interviewer] During the last twenty years, you developed many cross-border teams, can you tell me a little bit about that? [Pietro Jarre] Yes, I had challenge and I was like enough to have this experience. I had the opportunity to build many communities across all the continents, communities of technical professionals who were engaged also in building business, so I helped them in building the tools to support their cooperation. This has been a very exciting, fantastic experience. Global clients need these global communities. They need people that share experiences, that build together products for these global clients. We can help them in doing that, we have helped them in doing that. It has been rewarding, challenging but it has given me a lot of satisfaction. [interviewer] I know that you helped build a global enterprise. Now, in your experience, what were the greatest difficulties that you had in supporting professionals in their cooperation efforts? [Pietro Jarre] Supporting professionals in their cooperation is a challenge linked to the continual change of their organisation. Good professionals succeed, a good professional gets more work. Could. This is the success. This is difficult but it is relatively easy compared to the difficulty that you have in implementing continual change in your organisation. Again, if I succeed I build a model. "I succeeded there, okay, then, that is the right recipe." That becomes a model. When I use this model and I try to replicate this model in a different context, I fail. So the challenge in growing a professional firm is the challenge that, maybe other service industries have, which is the challenge of continual change. Then, at the enterprise level, the challenge is mainly due to the fact that you need to align all the departments of the organisation to this continual change. So human resources, technical departments, financial departments and so on must be aligned and must have and keep the same pace of change. To me, in my experience, the highest difficulty in this area has been related to the fact that the way we measure the company performance, the performance of the professionals, often stays behind. And so why some departments go very fast and change, other departments stay behind and sleep. This is the challenge of the professional industry. Too often I see firms which are too much focused on short-term financial measurements. Instead, it is absolutely true that when you put money on top, you fail. And so, I recommend enterprises of this kind to put people and clients on top. Happy employees and satisfied clients generate the money. It's not vice versa. It's not the other way round. [interviewer] So, Pietro, a final question: what are your plans for the next few years? [Pietro Jarre] For the next few years, I would like to continue to learn. I would like to continue to live. I would like to continue to live the experience of building professional enterprises across the borders, in different units but mainly in the fields of my technical knowledge: environmental engineering, infrastructures and the like. I would like to work from a more detached position, more, a bit, like an advisor, if possible. I would like to be less involved with day by day decisions and, from an advising position, working a bit like a grandfather, if I may say so. If I may say, in our society these days, we have too many fathers with their fingers in the pie, changing things every day and so on and we don't have enough people who stay behind, coach, mentor, give advice, do supervision... So, in essence, I would like to be an "organisational grandfather". 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