Jean-Pascal Tricoire grew up in rural France in the 1970s. He took up engineering at Angers, and later earned an MBA from what is now EMLyon. What is interesting about Jean is he would eventually lead a multibillion multinational company but did not go through one of the grandes école courses, the traditional programs of France’s elite executives.
He began his career at Alcatel, the telecommunications firm in 1985. Then Jean joined Schlumberger, the management consultancy firm before moving on to construction firm, St. Gobain. Then he joined electric company Merlin Gerin, which was later acquired by Schneider Electric. Starting 1988, Jean spent most of his time working abroad at Schneider’s international operations. He spent five years in Italy, five years in China, and a year in South Africa.
Upon returning to France in 1999, he was named as head of the company’s global strategic accounts and of the Schneider 2000+ programs. Jean between January 2002 and 2003 was the executive president of the Schneider’s international division. In October 2003 he was promoted to COO. Jean was named CEO and Chairman of the Board in May 2006.
Coming from a rural background, Jean loves to travel to see different places. While his job allows him to travel he believes that he only sees 20 percent of the country while on the job. To know more about the other 80 percent one has to go out of his way to see the country by going around on a personal trip.
In line with his interest of seeing other places, Jean is also leading Schneider, one of Europe’s largest engineering groups, to do more business outside of France, and outside of Europe. More emphasis has been placed on emerging markets. In fact Jean relocated to Hong Kong in 2011, to emphasize the point that they had to do business in other parts of the world. In the process he became the first CEO of a major publicly listed French company to move out of France.
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