“ I'm going to write stories. ”
When Jennifer De Thélény, a criminologist and a graduate of HEC business school who was doing communication and public relations, decided in 2014 to devote herself to corporate projects and the values of the great captains of industry, it was clear she was going to do this through the medium of language.
Immensely curious and deeply humanist, she is a great listener who is a past master at anchoring herself in the reality of the other and in making it her own. And then, with her characteristic elegance and rigour, she sets about carving the adventure of a life into tight chapters, each with its carefully chiselled sentences. And indeed, Héros modernes is itself a testimony to this visceral desire to celebrate human nature in all its dimensions.
“ I never pigeonhole the person I’m meeting as an entrepreneur : I'm looking at a man or a woman who happens to take on this entrepreneurial dimension. And each time we meet, I feel grateful for the trust they have placed in me. My professional investment reflects this. It is a privilege to be entrusted with a courageous personality’s life. Indeed, the biographical process is itself heroic, for it requires the courage to reveal as much about one's foibles and failures as about one's successes and strengths. I find it fascinating as a biographer that this great character, who finds themselves at the top of their game, let’s say, or who may be about to sign the deal of the century, can be the bearer of a whole transgenerational legacy, of a set of values and a philosophy of life — that this hero knows that there is a whole lot at stake in what they are bearing along. And in the end the reader discovers the entrepreneur or the creator — the modern hero — in a different way : my approach is quite humanistic. ”