Five European Women - Shaping Business Performance

Ayming Institute’s latest book is out!

Following its first book, The Balanced Business, exploring the good practices to thrive and succeed in today’s economy, Ayming Institute has just released five european women, Shaping European business performance.

The book, focusing on the professional journeys of five women, discusses and cross-references their views on the place women hold in large companies through sincere and factual testimonies.

This book published by Editions Débats Publics addresses issues related to the feminization of management roles:

Do women really work differently?
How do they contribute to business performance?
Do they have the same priorities and methods as men?
Do they bring a new form of management?
What differentiates female leaders?

They tell their stories and share their visions and the challenges they have encountered in establishing themselves. This collective book, which combines French and European experiences in multiple industries from new and traditional sectors of our economy, offers a concrete, operational and inspiring reflection on the place women hold on the board of directors.

Author’s Words

Anne Rigail

Anne Rigail studied at the prestigious French engineering school École des Mines, before joining Air Inter. When Air Inter and Air France merged, she stayed with the group, becoming Head of Client Services at the Paris-Orly Airport and then Director of Passenger and Baggage Connections at Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport. In 2009, she was named Vice-President of Ground Operations at Paris-Charles de Gaulle, and in 2013 she joined the Air France Executive Committee, for the first time, as the Executive Vice-President responsible for cabin crew. In 2017, she became EVP of Customer Services, with overall responsibility for the client experience, before becoming the first female CEO of the company at the end of 2018.

We don't give seats to women: they take them. I have often felt that the first enemy a woman must overcome to succeed is the mental stereotype and roles that society has taught her.
Anne Rigail

Emma Marcegaglia

Emma Marcegaglia has been the Chairwoman of the Italian oil and gas firm ENI since 2014. She is also the Chairwoman and CEO of Marcegaglia Holding SpA, and the Vice Chairwoman and CEO of the group’s subsidiaries. She has held these roles in her family’s steel manufacturing group since 1996.
As President of Confindustria (the Italian business association), she was part of a significant employment law reform during the Monti Government.

She was the first female President of Confindustria (2008‑2012) and President of the Confederation of European business associations (BusinessEurope) from 2013 to 2018. Given her family’s historic steel business and her pre-eminence as a businesswoman in Italy, it is perhaps unsurprising that she is sometimes referred to as the “Steel Lady”.

Throughout my career, I have sought to learn from other women and one of the characteristics I have found is this work ethic; we will maneuver our competitors if we want to beat them.
Emma Marcegaglia

Julie Chapon

Julie Chapon is one of the three co-founders of the Yuka nutritional application. She gained her first experience with global brands during her studies at EDHEC, a prestigious French business school. Nutrition and health have always been his main interests. She also maintains a very popular blog that addresses these issues. The blog was also born from an idea of the team to use technology to encourage greater changes in the nutritional health of readers. The Yuka application has nearly 10 million users and more than 2 million products are scanned daily.

Women do not necessarily have the same education as men, and this leads to a form of self-censorship among women when it comes to pay and title. Women have been marginalized and even made invisible, but now we are fighting hard.
Julie Chapon

Laurie Pilo

Laurie Pilo is the Managing Director of Ayming Benelux, a business performance consulting firm. She has spent almost her entire career with Ayming, joining the firm upon completion of her doctorate in Health and Social Security Law. In 2013, she moved to Brussels to take the helm as the new Managing Director. She has been working out of the firm’s Brussels office ever since, where she heads a rapidly-expanding team. Ayming has offices around the world and works with clients on strategic issues in a variety of fields, most notably relating to innovation, finance, HR, and operations.

Women should not have to behave like men to succeed as men. It is not the fact of being a woman or a man that makes a person a good or bad decision-maker, it is the fact that there are different points of view around the table.
Laurie Pilo

Christina Garmendia

Cristina Garmendia is a Spanish entrepreneur and politician. After completing her doctorate in molecular biology, she joined an industrial fisheries group, occupying various commercial and business roles. When she left, she had risen to the position of Executive VP and CFO. In 2000, she launched Genetrix, a company specialising in biotech. It was the first private company launched on the basis of research from the Spanish national biotechnology centre. She is still the president of Genetrix, which is now a group of a dozen companies.

Is it a difference in vision? No, it's a difference in education. I believe that when women and men are raised the same, there are no differences. Performance is above all a socio-cultural issue.
Christina Garmendia

The book is available in bookstores and on Amazon from June 13, 2019. Click the link below to claim your copy.

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Ayming Institute is the reflection and innovation laboratory of the Ayming Group. Under the same brand, it brings together all the high value-added knowledge produced by experts to think about tomorrow’s performance, at the service of all economic players and business strategies