What was it like working for André Chagnon? I have been asked this question on several occasions in the past and again after the announcement of his death last Saturday. The answer is always the same. We don’t work for André Chagnon, we work with him. His natural leadership, smiling, humble, authentic, constantly invited to excel and innovate, always oriented towards his vision of the future.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
I had this immense privilege to know him for years, and to grow professionally and personally by his side. Many will rightly point to his exceptional qualities as an entrepreneur, his humanism and his exemplary social commitment. It’s normal, André Chagnon founded one of the largest and most admirable technological companies, then one of the best endowed philanthropic organizations in the country, without ever losing sight of his modest origins and his anchoring in family values. It was from the kitchen table, his inseparable Lucie by his side, that he began his remarkable entrepreneurial journey.
Throughout his life, André Chagnon proved to be a great visionary, an undeniable leader and a pioneer in a field that he greatly contributed to opening up to the technological revolution.
I often hear voices for whom his greatest innovations were naive and too ahead of their time. For example, interactive television, Videoway terminal, telemetry and UBI. Perhaps these technological “adventures” were too hasty, but I prefer to believe that they broke on the walls of backward regulation and excessive constraints imposed on their commercialization. In the early 1990s, Videotron’s and TVA’s competitors multiplied their interventions with the CRTC to denounce the “undue advantages” that the interactive television and multiplexing experiences resulting from Videoway would provide to its promoter. At the same time, the Quebec government rolled out the red carpet for Ubisoft, with generous tax incentives, to launch Montreal into the still early development of a video game and multimedia industry. The tenant economy was already tough at that time.
Fortunately, André Chagnon’s ideas aroused more interest and admiration in Europe, particularly in England, France and Morocco, where he strongly inspired the development of cable television, private television and interactive broadcasts. He was notably invited as a financial and strategic partner of the 5e channel when the French government set in motion the process of privatization of the major TV channels in 1987.
I bring up these stories of André Chagnon’s businesses because I had the pleasure of participating directly in them and fully experiencing the dynamics of inspiration, innovation and empowerment that this great man naturally reflected. It was perhaps when recalling his beginnings with Lucie at the kitchen table that he used a pretty metaphor, also drawn from culinary language, to express his full confidence in his collaborators: “When I hire a chef to run the kitchen is not to tell him what menu and what recipes to make in order to please the customers. If they turn their backs on the kitchen, then I will know that the time has come to change chefs. »
This is why I believe that André Chagnon has always been able to embody in his professional and personal entourage the deep values of trust, respect, simplicity, humanity, commitment and surpassing oneself.
André Chagnon’s marked sense of family will have accompanied him until his last breath. He left to join Lucie in the days that would have marked the 94e birthday of his lifelong great accomplice. He will find in the afterlife his son Christian, who died less than a year ago from a dazzling cancer, and his granddaughter Caroline, daughter of Monique and Christian, who died of illness at the age of 26 years old, a few days before the death of his grandmother Lucie in 2014. Now seated at the kitchen table in heaven, he will want to brew the soup of a better world that he has undertaken to build with the Lucie Foundation and André Chagnon.
Thanks for everything, Andrew. Rest in peace.