Novartis – Jean-Therapy Breakthrough

An INSEAD alumni meeting was held on 29 November 2018, on the Novartis campus in Basel. INSEAD for those not familiar, is a leading graduate business school with campuses in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. INSEAD is consistently ranked among the best business schools in the world.

Key speaker of the evening was Steven Baert, Head of HR for Novartis. It would be an understatement to say we were a little surprised at his appearance! It seemed as if our INSEAD event had dragged him away from a pool party, or maybe his child’s Birthday party! He was dressed very informally in jeans! We felt guilty at messing up Steven Baert’s evening plans. He was by far the least well-dressed person in the room.

Steven Baert is a graduate of IMD business school. The Financial Times ranks INSEAD as the number 1 business school, IMD, at rank 21.

It later became clear that Steven Baert’s fashion statement was not a lapse in IMD education but rather that Vasant Narasimhan, the CEO of Novartis has been using many recent interviews and conferences, such as Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York, earlier in November 2018 to explain how he wants to ‘un-boss’ Novartis, and he’s starting with letting employees wear jeans to work.

„This is a push to changing Novartis‘ culture to make Novartis a more appealing place for the millennial generation to work. Already, half of Novartis's 120,000 workers are millennials. There's aesthetic changes involved, such as wearing jeans to work.“

Some things remain unclear to us, the uninitiated.

What kind of punishment was meted out to employees, who in the past made the fashion faux-pas of appearing at their job in jeans? Did they get a poor performance rating, loose bonus, a claw back on equity, fired?

We look forward to the new cutting edge metrics on this that Novartis will produce, such as what has been the positive effect of jeans on attracting talent, or the correlation between innovation and wearing of jeans. Will the Board and executives also set a similar benchmark by underpinning this new philosophy at the annual meeting?

I have yet to meet a consultant, say from McKinsey, who visits a client dressed in jeans. There must be a reason! Steve Jobs though did make the black turtleneck and blue jeans his trademark.

What did Steven Baert talked about? Cannot quite remember: to echo Coco Chanel: “Dress shabbily and they remember the clothes; dress impeccably and they remember the person.”

"Sometimes, I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn't make me Madonna. Never will."
Cyn. In the film  „Working Girl“

Here dress tips from our friend Alex Costa at Google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkgiY3Kioj0