K. Y. : Start-up success stories always focus on individual achievements. In reality, it is generally a team that has invents something new and that something is greater than the sum of the individual capacities of each individual. Our school also marks a break from the culture of individual selection that has shaped our educational system. When new students arrive, their first instinct is to hide their screens from others, because schools teach that looking at your neighbour's work is "copying"! They need to be re-taught how to work in groups. As soon as you get past the teacher-student paradigm, many new things happen, both in solving problems on the machines and in relationships with other students. Of course, we are there to guide them, but the founding principle is that the student is learning to work both as an individual and as a team member. We create an environment in which everyone is empowered to do their own work, learns to be comfortable with others watching and opens up to the group. To students, it is a mostly individual challenge at the start, but becomes more of a group challenge as the course continues. The partnerships that we have established with schools like HEC and Centrale provide them with new ways to work together. And if there is a culture shock, if they fail at first, that's even better! By learning from their mistakes and moving outside their own comfort zones, they will be better prepared for the real world of their careers. F. M.-D. : We can't succeed alone. The more complicated the world is, the more we need different bright minds to come together and connect. This isn't easy in a business world historically shaped by values that emphasise individual performance. But teamwork is also essential, especially as part of an innovation strategy. For instance, last year we began a project called PEPS (Projet Expérimental Participatif et Stimulant, “Collaborative, Inspirational and Experimental project”) that asked all of our employees around the world to say what they thought the bank of tomorrow would look like. The discussion took place on our social network. At the beginning there were 3,000 people signed up on the network and at the end there were 30,000! The level of involvement and flow of ideas we saw caught us by surprise. The debate spilled out from the silos and crossed borders between countries and businesses. Although the topic was digital transition, our corporate community used the social network to build a collaborative system and harness group intelligence. Although we might have expected some people to recoil from the changes being brought about by digital technology, instead we saw people express a desire to move our core businesses, our services and our practices in the same direction as the world moving around us. 36 I SOCIETE GENERALE 2013-2014 COLLABORATION OPENNESS It is generally a team that invents something new and that something is greater than the sum of the individual capacities of each individual
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