YUMAN joined FABERNOVEL INSTITUTE in November. We met Yves-Henri, General Manager, to learn more about YUMAN and its team.

• Hi Yves-Henri, could you introduce yourself as well as Yuman ?

Laurent and 2 partners created Yuman 10 years ago, based on the observation that the world was facing tremendous challenges, and that large companies had a clear impact on it.

The way the companies work make a difference for their people, and we have the conviction that companies are living organisms, not machines. So we use collective intelligence to mobilize and engage people in designing their future, and we address simultaneously cultural, systemic and behavioural approaches to support companies in their transformation. An important thing to mention is that we do not come with the solutions : we help them build their own solutions, adapted to their own situation.

In 2009, YUMAN started to organize and facilitate forums to accelerate change. The team observed that if leaders didn’t embody change, nothing happened. So we started to work with ExCom, CEOs and Directors, ahead of the Forums and we started to help them design, and implement transformation. Finally, in order to autonomize them on the long-term, we trained their internal Change Makers, who are people within the organizations in charge of leading international transformation.

Among our current customers: Moët-Hennessy, Kering, Sanofi.

As for me, I started my career in Japan, as a free-lance, then worked for NGOs in Madagascar and Kosovo, before joining EM Lyon Business School for more than 10 years. There, I created the Asian campus in Shanghaï, before launching The World Entrepreneurship Forum, an international Think Tank specializing in entrepreneurship that gathered 240 experts of 70 nationalities as well as 10,000 students worldwide. I co-created 2 companies in the past 5 years and joined Yuman 3 years ago, where I have been General Manager for the past 6 months.

• Who are other team members at Yuman?

Our team is made up of professionals with very diversified personalities and backgrounds in Consulting (of course!), in HR, in Entrepreneurship ...

We are a team of 12 people, with 3 different professions :

• Senior Consultants, leading change in organisations
• Project Managers controlling the proper execution of a mandate, collecting and synthetizing contents, managing the technical platform we use during our forums
• Operations Professionals : in charge of design, finance, marketing and communication.

But we do not only focus on our core businesses, we also contribute to Yuman’s daily life and growth according to our aspirations through a collaborative organization made up of circles : Tribe (in charge of HR), Studio (in charge of operations), Sales (you guess), R2D2 (in charge of innovation).

• Why are you joining FABERNOVEL today?

Laurent was very careful to whom he would cease YUMAN to.

When we started meeting the FABERNOVEL teams, we had the feeling that we could trust them.

In the meantime, we have discovered many common points: diverse profiles, different from other consulting firms, a way to put clients at the centre of each project by simply considering ourselves as facilitators and co-constructing with them.

We have also noted complementarity in the areas of expertise. For example, for a customer, IPSEN, FABERNOVEL manages the digital transformation part, while Yuman is on the managerial transformation. We have also already started working on joint projects and we hope to win quicky a joint proposal.

Our cultures are complementary too, and even if we are usually older than our counterparts in Institute, I can tell you that YUMAN team is being amazed by the quality and professionalism of the people they have met and worked with.

• What are our common goals now?

Before merging, YUMAN had 3 major challenges, beyond sales :

- Recruiting: expand the team by recruiting new senior consultants (someone who is caring and has a good understanding of processes and organizations).

- Internationalizing: both for international clients and team members

- Digitalizing : we already have a platform used during our forums but we would like to develop as a tool to support our customers over the long term.

If I talk from a broader perspective, regarding the new INSTITUTE organization, I believe we have the common challenge to succeed in creating a lively company, where everyone, wherever organization it may come from, will enjoy working, will develop his/her unique talents, and will thrive alongside other Talents, serving together a common vision of the world.