RAISE Group
Clara Gaymard and Gonzague de Blignières founded the RAISE Group in 2013, and they are currently the co-CEOs of the group. There are around 40 people working at RAISE, which consists of the following five units:
RAISE Investissement — a development capital company that targets mid-cap companies
RAISE Sherpas — a foundation to support, fund, and raise the profiles of start-ups
RAISE REIM — a real estate fund management company
RAISE Ventures — an investment vehicle that targets innovative start-ups
RAISE Impact — an impact investment company
The group has raised more than 1 billion euros in capital so far and is about to raise another 500 million euros. There are around 60 investors, around half of which are large corporations, and the other half are families or family offices. The investors are generally in it for the long-term and receive dividends rather than proceeds from exits.
The work philosophy at RAISE is distinctive:
Be generous. An essential factor here is the fact that the investment teams pass on 50% of their carried interest to the endowment fund, RAISESherpas.
Be smart, humble, and open-minded.
Be good learners.
This style of working is a unique aspect of the philosophy of the firm: There are always two persons in each office — one female and one male — and the teams make decisions (we, not me). If there is a disagreement, then they do not make a decision!
Supporting entrepreneurship is a control objective at RAISE. The foundation supports around 250 entrepreneurs who are chosen from a population of more than 2500 candidates. These entrepreneurs must have a strong belief in their ability to change the world. The role of RAISE is to provide advice and support without getting involved in actually running any of the entrepreneurial ventures.
The management philosophy at RAISE has at least two additional dimensions. First, learning is central, and this goes two ways. Entrepreneurs must be open-minded and curious, with an intense appetite to learn from the RAISE team. Of course, this team learns from the entrepreneurs, too. RAISE sees learning from the younger generation as crucial. Ms. Gaymard, for instance, feels that she is learning a lot from her nine children!
Second, RAISE also sees empowerment as critical, perhaps particularly so when the organization is undergoing rapid growth.
The heads of each of the five organizational entities within the RAISE Group are deliberately given increasing degrees of freedom, for instance.
This brings us to RAISE’s unique way of recruiting new members. The top management feels that it is particularly critical that all employees share a common philosophy. It sees this as much more important than a particular candidate’s specific skills, education, and training. The top management asks each new hire to write a so-called love letter. The top management feels that such a letter tends to give a strong indication regarding a given candidate’s buy-in when it comes to RAISE’s goals, especially the one that states that a candidate must donate 50% of his or her bonus to the RAISE Foundation. Is the candidate likely to be happy at RAISE? Such a letter might also reveal whether a person is generous and team-minded, in contrast to an overly strong emphasis on self-driven career building. It is interesting to note that this approach seems to work.
Let us now discuss how RAISE seems to see the roles of several other entities involved in business:
The entrepreneurs. The top management at RAISE has several rules of thumb for describing an effective entrepreneur. He or she must firmly believe that he or she can actually change things. Without being naïve, he or she must be convinced that he or she can do it and must always try harder — he or she must be a rebel! There is no such thing as failure. Instead, there are events that good entrepreneurs can learn from; failure is not a mistake but a step to learn. There is always something positive in every outcome. A key requisite for being a good entrepreneur seems to be that he or she must not place importance on his or her social status. Only then can he or she see failures, for instance, as inspirational events that prompt him or her to do better.
Board members. Ms. Gaymard serves on four boards of large public companies. She feels that the most important task for a board member is to help create a common purpose among stakeholders in a given firm. Thus, a board member must understand the purpose of the company at which he or she is serving on the board. It also follows that he or she must be comfortable with the firm’s CEO. Strong leadership is needed from the CEO as well as from the various board members so that everyone can establish and share a clear sense of purpose. It is important that a board member is able to ask the “right” questions, especially those that might not fall into the day-to-day category of issues. Contributing toward building strong social links to the environment is part of this.
The CEO. He or she must be curious (i.e., be a good “learner”) above all. He or she must be guided in his or her decision-making by what is best for his or her company and for the team that works in this firm.
Women in business. In many companies, women tend to be overrepresented at the lower organizational levels and underrepresented higher up, and it is typically quite hard for women to advance. A good proportion of women versus men in an organization might be, say, 40:60. Diversity is the key for better strategies and decisions and might de-emphasize unhealthy competition among executives in an organization. As already noticed, RAISE achieves this because it has executives of both sexes co-located in joint offices. This creates a "we, we, we” culture and team-based decisions.
RAISE is certainly not a typical company. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that today’s business climate is different than it used to be — it is a new world! Here are four issues that have gained importance when it comes to effective management today:
Locality is much more important. Customers and suppliers are local!
Consensus is key. Teams are managing, not the autocratic bosses of the past.
Management tools are changing. Now they are all digital.
Doing business for good is key: sustainability supports that goal.
Clara Gaymard
As noted, she co-founded RAISE in 2013 with Gonzague de Blignières after having been in charge of GE France for five years. She believes that open-mindedness is the key to learning quickly. She is half Danish.
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