LEADERSHIP

“ A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.”“ Moving the goalposts.” Business culture has been steeped in sporting clichés for as long as balance sheets, water coolers and Monday morning kick-offs( there’ s another one) have existed. But when Orange Business CEO Aliette Mousnier-Lompré talks about how attitudes of the pitch have the power to elevate a global business, it isn’ t lazy hyperbole frocked as motivational teamtalk( and one more). As a former midfielder for Paris Saint-Germain women’ s side, she is sharing lessons learned playing the highest level of football with her boardroom and beyond.“ All these choices, I now realise, were driven by the same desire: be excited about a challenge, just like I had been so many times before a football match,” shares Aliette on LinkedIn.“ It was about being part of a team who had worked hard before the kick off, was going to give it all on the pitch, and was going to get back together in the locker room at the end, to share whatever emotion was going to be ours.” Aliette’ s time on the pitch was more than two decades ago, and the order in which she writes her X bio feels deliberate:“ CEO, mum of two, former soccer player.” Even so, her time in football set the tone for what could be characterised as a career forged as an outsider. Not an outsider in the sense of being the underdog bereft of credentials, yet to whom success has come anyway. But an outsider who has continually found herself in institutions – elite sport, diplomacy, banking and a legacy telco – that were not formed with her in mind.

An outsider’ s education Aliette studied at Sciences Po Paris while pursuing football on the side, playing for PSG during the 2001-02 season in the top tier of French women’ s football, since rebranded as the Première Ligue. This was a time when football offered women few professional prospects, so Aliette built a career in parallel: she held internships in the diplomacy and banking sectors, institutions with their own rigid codes and hierarchies, before an internship at Orange that gave her, in her own words, an unexpected outlet for her ambitions. The Orange internship became a career, with Aliette rising through a series of roles that took her across the company’ s operational and strategic functions: Chief of Staff to the Executive Vice President in charge of Innovation and Research, then Executive Vice President of Global Enterprise Networks, before becoming Executive Vice President of Customer Service and Operations at Orange

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