INTERVIEW
What have you learned about leadership and decision-making since becoming CEO? Leadership is something you have to work on every day. It is a constant process of learning and evolution. People may imagine that the CEO of a global company makes an enormous number of decisions every day. In reality, my objective is quite the opposite. My goal is not to make every decision myself, but to build a team that is capable of making the right decisions. That means recruiting the right people, giving them the information they need and empowering them to make decisions. As an organization grows, there is always a risk that decisions move upwards and everything becomes slower. When I became CEO, one of my first priorities was financial understanding and transparency. You cannot ask people to make good decisions without giving them the information they need. The next step has been accountability: establishing clear objectives and responsibilities so that people feel ownership of their decisions.
How is the governance organized? Governance is particularly important in a family business because you have to ensure successful transitions from one generation to the next while preserving the ability to think and invest for the long term. When Edmund Optics became a corporation in 2000, we decided to establish a board of directors composed predominantly of independent members. Typically, we have seven or eight outside directors and only one or two family members. This is quite different from the governance model found in many family businesses, where the board may consist largely of family members or company management. Our objective was to bring genuine outside perspectives into the company. From the beginning, we recruited experienced leaders from industry and academia who could challenge our thinking and help us define our strategy. I have continued that approach. Alongside the board of directors, I also established a Family Council, which now brings together more than thirty members of the Edmund family. The chair of the Family Council also sits on our board. This creates a link between the family and the governance of the company while maintaining a strong level of independence in strategic decision-making. The objective is to combine the strengths of both models: remain a private family company with strong values and a long-term perspective, while adopting governance practices that bring independence, external expertise and strategic discipline.
What are the main advantages of being a privately held family company? The greatest advantage is our ability to think and invest for the long term. As a privately held company, we are not accountable to public markets every quarter. That gives us more flexibility in the decisions we make and allows us to focus primarily on what is right for the company, our customers and our employees over the long term. If a public company has a difficult quarter, there can be immediate pressure to reduce costs, cut staff, postpone capital expenditure or limit investment. We can take a different approach. If we believe an investment is important for the company ' s future, I can go to our board and shareholders and explain that we may accept lower profitability for a period because we want to retain our best employees, invest in new manufacturing equipment or continue developing a technology that will become important twelve or twenty-four months later. This is particularly relevant in photonics, where investment cycles and equipment lead times can be long. It has helped us remain resilient through economic cycles and continue
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