Staying at the top is not a one-off push. After a century as a benchmark of French gastronomy, and with the momentum of a landmark Olympic summer behind it, the task for a 550-person business is to make excellence repeatable: an operating standard every team can carry forward, not a program that fades after launch. That is the job of GEP Excellence.
The logic of GEP Excellence is simple: excellence starts with the head of the company. So the first deployment was the 15-person leadership team, the CODIR, mandated to steer the whole company. Set the standard where the strategy is decided, then scale it from there.
“Excellence starts at the top. If the team that sets the strategy doesn’t work to that standard, nothing below it will.”
How it works
The CODIR began with an OpenDecide scan, a shared, evidence-based read of how the team actually operated. It surfaced two root causes: misaligned objectives and unclear accountabilities. The team validated them together, then used the platform to run its own workshops, redesign its objectives and clarify who owns what. Seven months later, the team launched a new improvement cycle, and the progress it had made was revealed.
Effectiveness level evolution
Over two cycles, the leadership team’s effectiveness rose from a standing start to nearly 80%, and the impact showed up where the business is measured.
Scaling Excellence for the future
With the leadership team as the proof point, OpenDecide is now being deployed across other teams.
For a maison that has stayed at the top for a hundred years, staying there next rests on an organization that can scale excellence, one team at a time.