Sport and music continue to play an important role in Francois’s life.
But on hindsight not all of Barraults’ management decisions, including a controversial sales strategy conference in Las Vegas for Global Services staff, later becoming easy targets for critics. But Francois is quick to defend the culture and climate of BT at the time, “we inherited a mess and a staff with low moral and for 3 years we rebuilt the company from the ground up. We were ahead of the game in making operational savings and introducing new technology but at the heart of it was a renewed motivation amongst the team.”
After years of unsustainable losses, the Global Services department appeared to be turning the corner when in late 2007 the world was gripped by the global financial crisis. Share prices plummeted, established financial houses like Lehman Brothers closed their doors and like many multi-nationals BT’s forward progression began to falter. Whilst the early parts of the global recession began to bite, BT was racked by an internal power struggle with first the CEO Ben Verwaayen departing and then the long standing and much respected previous CEO Andy Green moving on.
and along with support from BT CEO Ben Verwaayen began transforming the company’s scattered and unstructured international assets into a multibillion- pound international IT business, called BT Global Services. The division is the today one of the most diverse parts of BT and supplies communications and IT to large multinational companies and governments, spanning across 176 countries. Under the stewardship of Barrault, the division added 800 new customers a year including heavy-weights such as Reuters, P&G and Nestle.
Francois continued his philosophy of building ecosystems, acquiring 32 companies during his tenure and integrating cutting edge technology into a service which was creaking under the strain of antiquated systems and infrastructure.
Barrault is still passionate about the new management philosophy he brought to BT, “my obsession is to create a project for the people. In a service business you need empathy. You need to like to serve others and you must never forget the people who do the work.”
For four years in a row Barrault was rated as BT’s top executive, scoring very good and outstanding on performance ratings which saw Global Services becoming BT’s star performer with revenues in Q3 2007 increasing to £1.965bn (up 6.3% on twelve months previously) and EBIDA jumping 23% 12 months ago to £215m in the quarter.
With cracks appearing at the Global Services division, Barrault was fighting a personal battle with a life threatening illness, something unreported in the press at the time. For a man who backs himself to lead from the front it was a devastating time as he began six months of treatment under heavy sedation to treat nine separate tumours.
“It is a sad fact that in the UK only entrepreneurs seem to really understand entrepreneurs.”
For a man tough on ethics, behaviour and values this was to prove a great disappointment as the press and new Chief Executive Ian Livingston swept aside the successes of the previous three years and declared a state of disaster and writing down the value of Global Services contracts but almost £2bn and announcing mass redundancies. Just two weeks after surgery, heavily sedated and too ill to return to work for the foreseeable future, Barrault resigned.
The media’s fabrication of events and the betrayal from within BT became clear when Barrault read a newspaper article that proclaimed he had been ousted. He remains to this day incensed by the lack of ethical
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