Strategy & Leadership
- Curiosity and lifelong learning help you shape your own path.
- Hands-on experience gives future leaders a practical understanding of business.
- Leadership rests on listening, empathy and the ability to create a sense of purpose.
- Economic performance, employee engagement and environmental responsibility must advance together.
- Building a meaningful career means choosing a direction and staying true to your convictions.
- Leading means preparing a company to thrive beyond your tenure.
In a discussion moderated by Rodolphe Durand, Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and Academic Director of the Purpose Center, Julien Hueber spoke to HEC Paris’s new students with humility. Without presenting his own path as a blueprint, the Nexans CEO reflected on the experiences, encounters and choices that shaped his career, from his first operational roles to leading an international industrial group.
His message centred on three guiding principles: being yourself, being with others and being for a purpose.
Being yourself starts with understanding who you are and identifying the common thread that will guide your career choices. For Julien Hueber, that thread has always been a desire to learn. Across some fifteen roles and eleven years abroad, including in Australia, China and South Korea, he sought to discover new cultures, new fields of work and different ways of doing things.
This curiosity goes hand in hand with a deep commitment to spending time on the ground. While leading Nexans’ European operations, he spent three days working alongside a morning-shift team on a production line—an essential experience for understanding the company’s human and industrial realities.
Being with others means knowing how to listen, bring people together and help them grow. When visiting a factory, Julien Hueber first looks at the faces of the operators. Their engagement and well-being give him an initial sense of how the site is doing. This conviction lies at the heart of Nexans’ E3 model, which gives equal weight to economic performance, employee engagement and the environment.
Being for a purpose, finally, means choosing what you want to contribute to. In deciding to focus on electrification, Nexans stepped away from some otherwise profitable activities. For Julien Hueber, leading means setting a direction, taking responsibility for your choices and staying true to your convictions.
This responsibility necessarily calls for a long-term perspective. A leader’s tenure is temporary: their role is to prepare the company for the future and leave it stronger, more resilient and more attractive.
Sustainability & Society
