Look Sports 1978…

The year 1978 began with a joint sales meeting with Beconta in Aspen, Colorado. What a way to start the selling season!

After some good skiing, I returned to New York and that’s when Philippe Blime decided he would replace his departing president part-time while still remaining the Look’s GM in France. He got himself an AMC Pacer as a company vehicle (a car his wife fancied) and came to visit a few times.

By the middle of that year, Blime realized that his plan wouldn’t work and decided to hire a replacement for Paul. I told him I wanted that top job, but he said that while I had the potential, I should stay put doing the marketing manager job my product manager position had gradually evolved into since I had been working in America. He just didn’t think I could pull it off. The man was stubborn and lacking solid common-sense.

In addition, he decided to hire two sales managers, Harrington in the East and Pike in the West. Harrington was an advertising manager for Olin skis and was clearly eyeing Look’s top job. He spoke a good game but wasn’t able to walk any of it.

Same thing Pike, a Xerox alumni, who had a great baritone voice but had no clue about the ski business and its quirky distribution. These choices reflected very poorly on Blime who might have been a number guy (?) but was woefully inept at reading people.

Since the joint Beconta/Look sales force was far from perfect, Harrington had no better idea than scrap it totally, throw the baby and the bathwater, instead of doing incremental changes as would have been advisable in that instance.

Instead, he started with a fresh stable of green guys who weren’t all that good and worse, were very inexperienced. A recipe for disaster. At the same time Salomon’s products were gaining ground over Look’s and I kept on pulling my hair but still learning an awful lot by witnessing my colleagues piling up mistakes upon mistakes.

The year ended on a wonderful note, though; the birth of our son Thomas in December.

First year in America

On May 2, 1977, Evelyne and I arrived at New York JFK airport via Swissair, were picked up by a limo, and whisked to the Ramada Inn, in Elmsford, New York. So far, so good.

The only bad news was that the weather was terribly hot and humid, we only had 2 weeks to find a place to stay, and my wife had to learn English in a hurry.

Looking for an apartment is always depressing and sooner than later we found one in White Plains, my wife enrolled in an ESL class, we bought a small Datsun and I went to work, hoping some kind of guidance from Paul, my boss, but it really was “the blind guiding the blind”. In fact I was the one teaching him about the ski industry while he couldn’t teach me anything about American business.

From the get-go, this wasn’t looking good. Later in the month, Evelyne and I traveled to Nova Scotia for a Canadian Ski Patrol symposium and a few days later, I was off to Europe for a Look sales meeting at Les Deux Alpes, where I met Jean-François Deschamps, the newly hired marketing manager who seemed to live on a cloud of textbook theories. I also met Thierry Convert, my replacement.

This said, there were still no visible signs of future improvements or positive changes.

Back in the office, I was terrorized by having to pick up phone calls from disgruntled dealers, having to write letters and memos, and truly felt like a fish out of water. What became obviously clear from day one, was Paul’s total incompetence.

My good common sense felt violated everyday as I watched him around and wonder where I had gotten into. In fact, through pain and despair, I learned an awful lot by watching people around me do totally stupid things. As one might have expected, Paul got fired at the year end.

Another bright spot was that I also began running to alleviate my daily stress and this became a passion that would last and benefit me for about 40 years.

At the end of the year, when Evelyne and I flew back to France for the Christmas Holidays on Icelandic Airlines, this was a welcome break in an otherwise grueling first eight months...

Adventures in home security…

Recently my son bought three Nest security cameras and placed them around his house. The last time I was at his place, he gave me a demo on his phone app.

I was impressed, and my wife and I thought it would be a good idea, even through no one has ever loitered around our houses, yet alone broke into them. I shopped around and narrowed my choice in favor of the Arlo Pro 2.

I drove to the nearby Best Buy and bought a two-camera package. These systems aren’t cheap, but the Arlo, unlike Nest, offers 7 days on-cloud storage absolutely free. First, Best Buy screwed up and gave me the wrong definition cameras (720 vs.1080), so I had to return to the store, negotiate the exchange and get the right items.

The next day, I proceeded to unpack my purchase, get the system hooked up into my wifi, downloaded the phone app, etc. One hour into that process, I couldn’t make the second camera work, so I called the manufacturer, got routed to the Philippines and not only had a bad phone line, but also a technician who spoke incomprehensible English and didn’t understand me either.

I have experienced this many, many times already. In short, the guy couldn’t help me, so he offered to replace the camera, but with this caveat, I should return the defective unit at my expense. I asked him to repeat and told him that I’d gladly return the whole system to Best Buy instead and get a full refund, which I did.

By then, the whole process had shaken my confidence in the product, pushing me to bag the whole security camera idea. At least for now.

First months in America…

When I finalized my commitment to come to America, it was agreed that I would make two trips of about one month each, one in January and one in March, before moving for good, with my spouse early May.

I needed to honor the commitment I had made to the Avoriaz ski school for the peak periods of the winter season, and also needed to organize our personal affairs in view of our move. This was particularly tough on my wife who stayed alone in France for such a long period of time, near my family that wasn’t particularly supportive.

As I reentered the ski school for the Christmas holidays, I realized that after two full season of being absent, I had seemingly lost my mojo and also my priority ranking. This was hard to swallow. My first trip took place early January 1977 and lasted about a month.

I accompanied Blime, Look’s managing director, along with Cattin, the Beyl’s son in law, who was progressively introduced into the company picture after running his family appliance distribution in Africa. Why was he brought in, I have no idea; some form of training perhaps?

We established our living quarters at the Rye Hilton in Purchase, New York and worked with Ed Paul, the newly minted Look Sports, Inc. president. Why in the world did Blime hired Paul still mystifies me to this very day. The man was a total misfit and clueless about business in general, not to even mention the ski industry in particular.

At any rate, we spent days crunching numbers, getting to know the ski media, meeting the sales force and analyzing our future business in all possible directions. Coming from McKinsey’s, Blime was a numbers man who didn't understand human relationships and wasn't able to understand Look's existing dealership.

We should instead have spent time crisscrossing the country to learn from retailers about Beconta’s distribution, its sales force and what was needed in terms of products and programs. This would have gone a much longer way.

From the start we shared the sales force with Beconta, our host and former distributor and this very quickly became fraught with conflicts and bad influence. From the start, Beconta’s Pitou was openly making fun of our president, and I could see that things were not going to be fun...

I returned in March, attended the annual ski show in Las Vegas and slowly began to get my feet wet with this new business environment. Teaching skiing, as I had just found out, was no longer a viable option for me.

Now, I was on the cusp of learning an awful lot, everything was totally new and I was ready to make the best out of this extraordinary venture.

Surviving Nevers for sixteen months

We were newlywed when my wife and I moved to Nevers on September of 1975. First, we rented a nondescript single family house, with animal trophies on every wall, then we purchased a “historical” apartment right in the middle of old town, near a covered market.

This is were I would experience urban living mostly at its worst, parking our car in the street, with opposite side neighbors ogling into our space and a roof that failed as soon as we moved in. The summer of 1976 would also prove to be extremely hot, making our experience quite uncomfortable and this is not even mentioning a job and a workplace that I didn’t enjoy.

Thank God, the Beyls were nice enough to grant me a month off in January 1976 to go to Chamonix for my last certification step in ski instructing. This enabled to ski a bit more, even though we would return every weekend to Morzine and brave the five and a half hour drive each way. This regularly gave us a chance to ski and escape a place we both despised.

Since nothing in my new career or my new residence was working well for us, we decided to put our apartment up for sale in November of 1976 while, in spite of making very good money, I resigned my position with Look. My plan was to rejoin the Avoriaz ski school for the winter season and use that time to reassess my future career options.

With Christmas as an exit date, I participated at our international meeting that took place early December and this would literally be a life-changing event. During that meeting, Look was welcoming Paul, the newly hired president of its American subsidiary that would start operations on January 1st and be located at its current distributor facilities, in Elmsford, New York.

That distributor, Beconta, was in the sporting goods business and was handling Puma athletic shoes, its own line of ski clothing, Dolomite boots and Kästle skis. Pitou, its sales manager had accompanied Paul for the meeting as he learned that I was leaving Look, thought it would be a good idea for me to come to the U.S. as a way to help launch the new subsidiary.

This sounded good to me as it was better than “relapsing” into ski instructing or working elsewhere in France. Call it flight forward if you will, but I was seduced by the idea and while I thought that I would play that opportunity by ear, I accepted the offer and negotiated an okay deal that got me to America...

Product manager at Look

Exactly just one year after I had been hired as manager of racing services, I was promoted sideways into the company’s product manager job. This was a brand new position within the organization for which, as you might have guessed, there was no figment of job description.

The only idea was that I would liaise between our various sales forces or distributors, and the company’s research and development department, in an effort to get the right products out of the production line.

This job wasn’t easy. Not only had the position to be created from scratch, but it was hard to make it work under Look founder Beyl’s autocratic rule. He was basically filtering everything that entered the research and development department and was quite dogmatic about what he wanted the future Look products to be.

I was trying to warn him against the impeding onslaught of Salomon and his slew of convenient products, but he would always temper my energetic bursts of passion with comments like “Salomon, Salomon, Salomon… That’s all you can say, but mark my words, Salomon is a giant with feet of clay and they’ll soon collapse!”

During all that time, Look was in the red and the company was reacting by putting out dubious products like the LK5, a plate binding requested by the French sales force that always had the ears of Mrs. Beyl and was wreaking havoc on any kind of long term, disciplined product development strategy.

I was pulling my hair out and was realizing what bad career choice I had made, especially in a spot like the town of Nevers that was planted smack in the middle of nowhere...

Small projects, endless time...

“It will only take me a couple of hours”… We say this all the time, and at the end, the seemingly small project for which we allocated 120 minutes ends up taking half-a-day, a full one, or can even extend into a second day of struggel.

This is exactly what happened to me this weekend when I decided to replace the fluorescent tubes in my garage with much brighter, and yet a tad smaller, LED wrap lights.

Granted, I’m no electrician, but I ran into so many small problems that the two or tree hours I had budgeted for that seemingly trivial task extended well into a second day. That was not counting with the help of my wife who was instrumental in helping complete the job.

The offshoot of that time-trap was that I learned a lot in the process and will do much better next time!