PRESS RELEASE – 10.06.2020
The Board of Directors of KEDGE Business School, chaired by Agnès GRANGÉ, has appointed Alexandre de NAVAILLES, the current President of Hertz France, to the head of the management school. After more than 23 years of success at Hertz, Alexandre de NAVAILLES will take up his position as of 1 July 2020.
"KEDGE must become the leader in preparing today's students for the challenges of tomorrow. With the appointment of Alexandre de NAVAILLES, we confirm our ambition to place our school's future in the hands of a manager with an international profile in order to accelerate KEDGE's transformation. As we seek to combine human values with our educational mission, this appointment will bring a dynamic and corporate vision to the world of business schools, where experience and services for learners, innovation, differentiation, internationalization, branding, will increasingly make the difference", says Agnès GRANGÉ, President of KEDGE's Board of Directors.
A seasoned leader, Alexandre de NAVAILLES has taken on multiple managerial responsibilities within Hertz, both in France and throughout Europe. He has been at the head of the group's largest international subsidiary for 5 years and brought his expertise to bear in a highly competitive environment, which has been marked by fundamental changes in customer needs and expectations.
By developing new disruptive, digital and eco-responsible offers, he has been able to make his company a reference in terms of customer experience.
For many years now, he has been concerned by the challenges related to CSR, and for the last 3 years he has been an ambassador for the Dauphine Foundation, which supports advancement in higher education by financing strategic and innovative projects.
In taking up the leadership of the school, Alexandre de NAVAILLES has chosen to place his experience at the service of the next generation. "The transformation of business models, the response to increasingly strong international competition, brand promotion, digitalisation, the need for an absolutely irreproachable level of service, are all the priorities that have been my driving force in recent years", he says, "and they are also the priorities of KEDGE Business School. Educating the leaders of tomorrow is an important and exciting challenge. The school must increase its international presence while continuing to work effectively to serve its students, its graduates and companies".
KEDGE Business School aims to reach and remain in the top 15 European business schools and get closer to the French top 5 schools in France by developing its potential as a school of excellence. To this end, the school is focusing on the following priorities:
- Making student satisfaction a fundamental lever of the school's transformation;
- Providing rapid, engaging and innovative responses to the COVID-19 crisis and its repercussions on the world of education and its impact on the development of tomorrow's leaders;
- Expanding and promoting the school's fundamental assets: its regional and international anchoring; excellence in research, culture and creativity; a portfolio of high-level areas of expertise; an extensive range of programmes; proximity to companies and multi-accreditation;
- Transforming the learning experience, leading KEDGE's project to help it differentiate itself through its digital ambitions and digitalisation, international development, the search for new growth engines, the influence of the KEDGE brand, social responsibility, and student service;
- Organising and uniting the management team around three key areas of reflection: transformation, academic excellence, and the resources available to the group.
"We are collectively going through a true anthropological transformation; our shared system of values is shifting. The crisis we are experiencing is altering our relationships with others, as well as our relationship to work and our relationship to education. There is no doubt that it will accentuate potential forms of dematerialisation and transform the world's business models. KEDGE aims to be a school capable of educating the actors of this transformation. The primary mission of the new Director General will be to reaffirm the school's mission-oriented positioning, as we focus on the creation of economic, environmental and ethical value", adds Agnès GRANGÉ.
