“At some point, someone had to have the courage to say things.” Morald Chibout is not the type to hide. This business leader, a pure product of French meritocracy, agreed to testify in L’Arabe dans le poste, a documentary broadcast by TMC on November 14 and which traces “the history of the visibility of Arabs on TV”. Several French personalities of North African origin are participating, including the comedian Ramzy Bedia, the former presenter of France 2’s 1 p.m. Rachid Arhab and the former minister Rachida Dati.
Although he has made few appearances on the small screen, Morald Chibout knows all the tricks of large companies, where the lack of diversity in senior management positions is glaring. His rich CV speaks for itself. Having moved to France Télécom at the start of his career, after a doctorate in economics, this son of illiterate parents of Algerian origin, from a family of 14 children, successively held three general manager positions. “Each time, they dared to give me a chance,” he assures.
The first at EDF, in 2004, to prepare the energy company for opening up to competition. It was Henri Proglio, then CEO of the company, who appointed him marketing director, then deputy general director of the individual market, at the head of 10,000 people.
After the energy supplier, in 2011 Morald Chibout took the helm of Autolib’, this public electric car sharing service, a pioneer in the world, and which was shut down seven years later. “We can think what we want about the character, but Vincent Bolloré had the courage to choose me. He one day had this extraordinary sentence: ‘Morald is capable of combining a brain with a kind of common sense and state of mind of someone who was raised in the street school'”. At 53, on November 1, he left his position as general manager of Cnova, the e-commerce subsidiary of the Casino group, and is now giving his advice to other managers.
His journey is an exception. “There is indeed a glass ceiling for senior executives from diverse backgrounds, but to reach my level, it is a concrete ceiling,” illustrates Morald Chibout, who deplores the homogeneity of the executive committees of the CAC 40 groups and barriers to entry. During his career, some superiors even suggested… that he change his name: “It was out of the question for me to live in the skin of another character. It’s a destruction of intellectual value.”
To try to move the lines, Morald Chibout supports young people from neighborhoods, stigmatized because they do not have “the codes of business”. “One day, the big boss of a group, a polytechnician, said to me: ‘You see, the advantage is that we have our own networks. You don’t have any’. But that’s completely false “We cut ourselves off from an entire generation because we give them an image of kids from the suburbs.” As a result, talents are turning their backs on France. “Today, there is no figure from diversity in the business world. In football, culture or rap, yes. But some young people do not want to do that,” judges Morald Chibout. A blind spot in the current debate on immigration.