Twitter Interview With Thierry De Baillon

Twitter Interviews – #CKinterview

Today’s Cross-Cultural Interview is with Thierry De Baillon.  You can also find him on Twitter: @t_de_baillon. This is a 2 part interview:

• Part 1 – The Blog Interview to get to know Thierry
• Part 2 – The Twitter Interview where Thierry answers 10 Cross-Cultural & International Questions

I met Thierry through some interesting cross-cultural discussions on Twitter.  Thierry writes a bilingual blog and is an Online Communication Manager at a big French IT services group.

Thierry De Baillon – Part 1

Here is the first part of the interview with Thierry – The transcript of the Twitter Interview is now below. You can find the interview on Twitter with the hashtag #CKinterview.

Cindy King: Hi Thierry, For those who don’t know you, can you please tell us something about yourself?

Thierry De Baillon: I am born in Paris, and lived in different places in France during my childhood. I began my career working as an illustrator for fashion offices. At that time, the words “innovation” and “creation” were synonym of Japan, and I left Paris for Tokyo in 1981 for almost a year. Back in Paris, I spent my time between as copywriter and “trends scout” for the fashion industry and helping brands to develop products and build their image. I “fell” into the Internet ten years ago, when, as Marketing Director for Creeks (a French casual fashion brand), I built what has been the first French fashion e-commerce website.

Since then, I worked in different companies to build national or multi-national corporate online strategies.

Cindy King: How did you pick up your cross-cultural skills?

Thierry De Baillon: Working for fashion offices has been an incredibly valuable training. Imagine yourself traveling all around the world for short periods of time, your mission being to detect emerging trends in all cultural fields (fashion, design, music, fine arts,…) and to determine in these trends what is and what isn’t applicable to other markets. Analysis, synthesis and commercial output, based on your sense of innovation and your ability to listen and decipher cutting-edge signals.

Cindy King: How do you use your cross-cultural skills in your job?

Thierry De Baillon: Listening is key while working in multi-cultural environments, so is the ability to build a common ground which doesn’t impair anyone’s identity. On the “human” side, brands are often much more powerful than they even realize, and taking care that they don’t crush customers’ and employees’ personal culture is even more important than building them from the corporate side of view.

Looking at the way people use technology like social media according to their culture is also an incredible way to drive innovation. First time I went in China, in 1981, I remember for instance having being stuck by the way people used phone handsets. Chinese people usually talk loudly, and, not to deafen their interlocutor while phoning in the street, instead of removing the earpiece from their ear, they removed the microphone from their mouth, holding the handset upside-down!!! Same technology, used in a totally different manner to accommodate with a different culture…

I also nurture this personal taste for innovation through personal research, which I -try to- express through my blog and my Twitter feed.

Cindy King: Can you tell us about your blog?

Thierry De Baillon: Blogging is the flip side of my other main online activity, on Twitter. There, I am able to develop scenarios and share long term insights. I began blogging five years ago, as I was unemployed for a couple of months. I would consider myself as a “sporadic” blogger, as I closed it two times already, but couldn’t resist getting at it again.

My blog’s title, “Sonnez en cas d’absence”, is a sentence I saw written on a shop’s window, which means “Ring the bell if I am away”, that is if something interesting happens, or if somebody wants to start a conversation, I am always ready to step in and take part.

As an interesting example: on last April, I hadn’t blogged for two years, when I found myself part of an online experiment: a French translation of a Chris Brogan’s post, with other French twitterers/bloggers (Emilie Ogez, Florence Meichel, Yann Leroux, Mario Asselin and Lilian Mahoukou). They then posted the translation on their respective blogs, linking to mine, thus ringing the bell again.

Besides that, this title has another (non obvious, but equally important to me) meaning: when you see this sentence on a shop’s door, you immediately understand it. You see nobody, so you ring. But it is all contextual; reading the sentence and thinking about it, you may well say “hey, if this guy isn’t around, how could he actually HEAR the bell ringing?” A lot of things do not make any sense when put out of their cultural context. This is, I think, a great lesson for us all to remember.

Cindy King: Is there anything new about your blog you would like to share?

Thierry De Baillon: Since I restarted blogging, I write in French and in English. I found out that most of the subjects I am talking about (social media, branding, enterprise 2.0,..) find a more logical and precise expression in English than in French. It might be related to the fact that there is much much more material available in English upon these subjects, but this might also mean that the mere concepts these subjects rely on (engagement, active trust,…) have a deeper rooting in Anglo-Saxon culture. Just an intuition I hope I will be able to dig in.

The blog and Twitter have helped me to connect with a lot of fabulous people all around the world, and great conversations often take place about subjects I am passionate about. As I am currently looking for a new position (scoop), this also helps me leverage my knowledge and, who knows, maybe find new opportunities.

Cindy King: Can you give us some deeper insights about yourself regarding your cross-cultural background?

Thierry De Baillon: I speak of course English and French, some Italian, a bit of German and Spanish, took Japanese lessons which I almost forgot,… and I would love to learn Arabic. Knowing that Arabic language doesn’t have a present tense – present is only intersection of past and future – totally fascinates me, as it induces a totally different perception of time. Languages are an crucial key to understand a foreign culture, as they relate to history, psychology, sociology, technology…

Cindy King: Have you come across any cultural stereotypes that bother you, or you find inappropriate?

Thierry De Baillon: All stereotypes bother me, and they are legion, as they are an expression of mental rigidity. Flexibility and openness are mandatory to be able to learn anything, and as the world is getting more and more complicated, and as things are evolving faster and faster, listening, thus learning, is a matter of survival.

Cindy King: Do you have a favorite movie that could help people understand cultural issues?

Thierry De Baillon: Blade Runner is a great tale about cultural blending and cultural misunderstanding. Even in future where a lot of different cultures have cross-fertilized (the little shops where Harrison Ford ask for an analysis of the scale he found, for instance, looks like a futurist vision of a Taiwanese market crossed with a Moroccan Medina), difference leads to misunderstanding, aggression, irrational behavior.

Part 2 – The Twitter Interview

UPDATE: Read what Thierry posted on his blog post after this Twitter Interview: Corporate Culture Is Infrastructure

More On International Business Ideas

This is an interview series of the people I recommend you follow on Twitter for the cross-cultural and international business insights in their tweets.

More Twitter Interviews

• Charmayne Paul – @psitutor
• Lucy Chatburn – @pocketcultures
• Doreen Iannuzzi – @DoreenatDMS
• Donna Jackson – @wisequeen
• Chris Cotter – @CotterHUE
• Jack Yan – @jackyan
• Silvia Cambié – @XCulture
• Bill Ward – @DR4WARD
• Seshu – @PicSeshu
• Neil Urquhart – @culturematters
• Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle – @transdomo
• Donagh Kiernan – @dkiernan
• Christian Hoeferle – @hoeferleconsult
• Caroline – @ohh_la_la
• Deborah Swallow – @DeborahSwallow
• Steve Roesler – @steveroesler
• Matthew Bennett – @matthewbennett

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