Post by Frederic DE AGOSTINI

As I prepare to take on a new challenge and hand over leadership as CEO of Orano NPS, I would first like to express my gratitude to everyone I have had the opportunity to work with over the past ten years. I have learned a great deal from you, I have truly enjoyed our collaboration, and together I believe we have achieved great things. It was hard but there was fun ! I will miss you... “Waking up the sleeping beauty” was the mission entrusted to me by Philippe Knoche when I took on this role in 2016. The first meetings with our clients were one-sided: good products, but too expensive; too many quality issues; too slow and not delivered on time. At first, it seemed that all of this stemmed from our subcontractors responsible for the manufacturing of our nuclear casks: insufficiently skilled, not agile enough, lack of organization, so on and so forth... But after meeting with each of them to challenge their performance and hearing every single one point to the same issues—NPS designs that were too complex, NPS procedures that were too long, NPS requirements that were too demanding—you come to realize that the only thing they all have in common is you. At that point, there is only one thing left to do: question yourself, start again from a blank page, embrace transformation, and put the entire company on a burning platform to encourage people to move, to change their mindset, to challenge themselves. Many left; some stayed and gradually turned a dream, a vision, an extremely ambitious goal into reality : #TNEagle & #TNEagleFactory. I would like to thank them and pay tribute to all of them here, because they have enabled Orano NPS to get back in the race today. None of this would have been possible without a business unit leadership team equally committed to change—this success is, above all, theirs. Above all, I’d like to thank Stéphane BONAFOS, Eric Delaunay, Emilie Saussac, Ludovic Mariette, Thibault Louvet, Olivier ROULLEAUX DUGAGE, Moctar MOUMOUNI, christophe Koenig, Boris Baille-Barrelle, Bertrand Muguet and many others among the NPS teams who did a wonderful job to achieve this goal, thanks a lot to all of them. "They didn’t know it was impossible—so they did it!" - Mark Twain- We, sorry..., you are going to win the #ChampionsLeague !   Now, it’s time to open a new page and take on a new challenge leading #ProjectIKE in the US. I’m grateful to Nicolas Maes for this great opportunity and to François Lurin for his support. I'll do my best. We will make it happen !