Funny that the name Veritas is creeping into these posts as soon as the bankruptcy proceedings are underway. It is only now that it is being aired when people are reflecting on what went wrong. 10 yrs ago Robert Brunck CGG CEO did a Town Hall in Crawley and confessed that CGG Seismic Services had never made money (implying of course that the success story was Sercel) and he recognised that Veritas had made money. 'We want to learn from you!' he exclaimed. We genuinely believed he meant it. Sadly, there were plenty in the layer beneath him in CGG who would not suffer the shame of such an admission, after all, they are the top 0.5% who have graduated from a Grande Ecole (set up by Charles De Gaulle to rebuild France after WW2 - and it was a plan that worked). In the 1960's to 1980's the UK suffered similar major business failures at the hands of the post war leaders (mainly from the military, not ecoles). The Richard Branson's of the modern era have changed all that over the last 20 years or so. Now, there is an understanding that you either need to know what you are doing at the top or you know who does below you and you allow them make proper business case based decisions and get on with delivering within their sphere of expertise.
The analysis is simple. Just look at the outdated Grande Ecole system. It gives alumni a god-given feeling of competency from being within that club. It is really ok not to have an in-depth knowledge of the industry. There is a brazen confidence that whatever eminates from their brains is just fine, even if they themselves see it as avant garde in nature; it really doesn't matter. Money is a dirty word. They think beyond these mortal bonds. They do not want to be in business anyway - they only ever wanted high-level government positions. Some of them still achieve this.
Veritas was just a business. CGG was something more.
Really good read, elevated to thread from @O0nUGkH-1jcj.