Word: messier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...universal idiot; the boob who believed it. Believed in what? That I was going to become rich, powerful, partake in the absolute quest of human happiness - one attainable with the laws of the triumphant market. Or better yet, that I'd become a little bit like Jean-Marie Messier myself. Why not give it a try? For more than a year, I only wore socks with holes in them, just like Jean-Marie. I also ridiculously parted my hair on the side and wore the permanent, ingratiating smile of a used-car salesman. I even made desperate efforts to avoid...
...known throughout France as J2M is a former water-company executive who became a French business celebrity by turning the sleepy water utility Compagnie Generale des Eaux into a $51 billion global media giant, Vivendi Universal. Messier did it with a six-year buying spree that brought Universal Studios, USA networks and a number of European media and telecom companies into the fold. His promise was to create a company that "will be the world's preferred creator and provider of personalized information, entertainment and services to consumers anywhere, at any time and across all distribution platforms and devices...
...Messier's first mistake was in perhaps biting off more companies than he could easily digest, his fundamental error in France was that he made enemies along the way with his insistence that American business culture was the future model that Vivendi would have to follow to be successful, a notion that rankled coming from a man who led both France's public water utility and one of its cultural centerpoints, the pay-TV company Canal Plus...
...didn't help Messier's case when he moved his primary residence to New York and started giving interviews saying that the beloved "cultural exception," subsidies granted by the French government to domestic filmmakers and other artists, was an outdated idea. In April things reached a point of no return when Messier fired Pierre Lescure, the popular president of the money-losing Canal Plus...
...Messier leaves full of regret. In a farewell memo to Vivendi employees he says he's leaving the company in order to save it, and pleads that his successor be given the time and freedom to implement policies that Messier himself believes he did not have. And, he says, people should feel free to email him. At his America Online address...