Jean-Claude Biver is head of the watches division at luxury conglomerate LVMH, where he oversees the Hublot, TAG Heuer and Zenith brands. He has spent his entire working life in the Swiss watch industry and has been credited with playing a primary role in saving it from the threat posed by the so-called “quartz crisis” of the 70s, when the new technology almost put an end to mechanical watchmaking.
Now in his late sixties, Biver started his career at Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet and then at multi-national brand Omega. In 1982, he and his friend, watchmaker Jacques Piguet, bought the rights to the Blancpain brand and started producing watches using traditional methods. They sold the company ten years later, and Biver returned to work at Omega, before joining Hublot as CEO in 2004. Here, he recalls a few of the highs and lows of his career – and some timely lessons he learned along the way.
“In the late 70s I was a hippie and I lived in a commune in Lausanne, Switzerland. I knew that I would not go and work for a big corporation; it really wasn’t my style. As a young boy, I’d been passionate about steam engines, but of course, they didn’t exist any more. Then a friend of mine, who was a watchmaker, said to me, ‘A steam engine is just like a watch: look at all the wheels and cogs. If your passion as a boy was steam engines, your passion as an adult can be watches.’”
“My friend introduced me to the boss of Audemars Piguet. He said, ‘I can give you a job in the sales department. But before that, I will give you an internship on half-salary for a year, because you need to understand the art of making watches.’ So for one year I worked with watchmakers every day. Slowly I understood their mentality, and I learned a lot about the history of watchmaking.”
“I left Audemars Piguet after five years because, when I asked the CEO about my future, he told me I would be the boss in 14 years after he retired. I was 29. That meant waiting until I was 43, which seemed old. I didn’t leave for a good reason, but because I was in a hurry.”
How do you manage your time?: My management style is through email – I never call. On the phone, you speak for too long, and nobody remembers what you say. I tell my employees to email me and not to write more than a quarter of a page. If it’s any longer, I won’t read it. You have to be concise.
What is your sleep routine?: Sleeping is like dying. Sleep takes your life away. I get up at 3am or 4am. I only need four or five hours of sleep.
What are your tips for coping with an international travel schedule?: Jet lag is my biggest enemy. It’s why I never stay more than one night – maybe two – wherever I go. As soon as jet lag starts to affect me, I say to myself, “I’m leaving, bye!” – and I’m on the plane. I leave the jet lag behind in my hotel room.
What’s your secret to public speaking?: I don’t do it for long and I talk in a way a baby can understand. The important thing is only to speak about what you truly know.
What is your advice for people just starting their career?: My advice is always the same: try never to work. And the only way not to work is to make money from your passion.
“[At Blancpain] we took advantage of the quartz revolution. The idea was to take the oldest watch brand in the world and make watches like in the past – not in a factory, but one man sitting at home on his own, making the watch from A to Z. By going back to the old way of working, we could create art again. And we had huge success. Our advertising claim was that since 1735, the year Blancpain was born, there had never been a Blancpain quartz watch – and there never would be. Everybody believed quartz was the future, but we said no.”
“I sold Blancpain because my wife left me. I’d never failed at anything before – and that was a weakness, because you must fail to get strong. Gradually, I lost motivation, and after two years I sold the company because I believed – wrongly – that it was the reason for the failure of my marriage. So I went back to my wife and said, ‘I’ve sold it, let’s start again.’ She replied, ‘I don’t love you any more.’ Without family life we can achieve very little. Family life means internal peace.”
“At Hublot, whatever we disrupt must make sense and must fit with our message. Take gold. What’s the weakness of gold? It’s soft, it scratches. But what about an alloy? I asked that question to professor Andreas Mortensen, a big guy in metallurgy. And a few years later he found an alloy that makes our gold unscratchable. We still have the patent. Our disruption is productive. We don’t disrupt for the pleasure of disrupting; there must always be a result, and it must always be coherent with our brand.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
