Cyril Peupion - Work Smarter: Live Better

Cyril Peupion

A passionate coach and speaker, Cyril Peupion was born in Paris. He studied in France and worked in Europe until the age of 33. In 2001 he moved to Sydney where he lives with his wife Toni Kim, their two daughters Fleur & Mirabelle, and their son Cameron. Cyril often says that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world and Sydney the best city to live in.

Cyril was initially trained as an engineer and majored in aeronautical and mechanical engineering. He soon realised he was not cut out to be an engineer and decided to do a master of Science in Management at Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), the leading European business school. In Europe he worked for British Airways as Director of Sales Northern France and as General Manager of the French subsidiary of EF Corporate, world leader in language training.

In 1999, Cyril and his wife went travelling around the world for six months. Newly-married, they decided to have a break from corporate life before kids. They always enjoyed travelling and had already done some great trips such as crossing part of the Sahara desert on a four wheel drive or trekking in the Andes. After a further six months touring the south island of New Zealand on a bike (2,500 km) and diving some remote and amazing places in the Pacific, Cyril and Toni Kim came to Australia and loved it. They applied for permanent residency and, in June 2001, started a new life in Sydney.

Cyril worked for several years for different companies and in 2006 decided to launch his own business in efficiency and performance. He met and went into partnership with his now friend David Dawson. David manages the executive search side of the business and Cyril the efficiency performance improvement division.

Cyrils business was built on both a frustration and a belief. As a fresh graduate, Cyril worked a few months for a strategic consulting firm. Although interesting, he found it frustrating to see so many great strategic ideas never executed. Companies spend a lot of effort and resources in developing their strategies. Either they hire external consulting firms, or their leadership teams undertake a number of in-depth offsite meetings throughout the year to produce their strategy. Amazingly, many of the resulting decisions are never realised. The issue is often not on the quality of the strategy and action plan decided on; it is how well these plans are turned into actions by everyone in the organisation.

Cyrils belief is that by challenging peoples work habits, by challenging what they are doing on a day-to-day basis, they can significantly re-align what they are doing with what they should be doing. They can have a significant impact on their performance and that of their business. What becomes quickly apparent is that challenging and improving peoples work habits has a huge impact on job satisfaction and work-life balance.

Today Cyril is a partner and director of Primary Asset Consulting. But above all, he is a passionate coach who focuses on helping people change work habits, take ownership and dramatically improve their performance.

Cyril has a solid and broad understanding of working with executives, their teams and their companies on talent development and effectiveness. He has worked closely with many senior managers and their teams in all types of industries and different countries. His ambition is to change the lives of the people he interacts with. It may sound like a very ambitious goal, but this is what ultimately drives him.

Comments such as, You have changed my life, or I feel so much more in control and happy with my job, or My performance has dramatically increased since I have worked with you, are the best rewards for a passionate coach.

As someone so rightly said, I dont care what you know until I know that you care. Cyrils passion is to help people and, as such, participants feel it and are then open to be challenged by new ideas and to change some of their work habits.

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www.wslb.com.au

To Bettina Pidcock, my first client, who pushed me to write this book and helped me along this journey.

To David Dawson: more than a business partner a friend. Your ideas and business sense have been truly inspiring for me.

To the St George Bank team: Jason, Neil, Geoff, Marnie, Matt and so many others. You gave me so much in your feedback and support.

To some great people who have helped me to publish this book: Rhiannon McCormack, who is so proactive, my editor Jo McKee, and my designer Graham Rendoth, who did a terrific job in a challenging time frame. The three of you have been amazing in helping me in this journey.

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT:DON'T LET INFORMATION SLOW YOUR PERFORMANCE

Six weeks per year

Let me tell you about a very interesting survey published several years ago in the Fast Company business magazine. The findings noted that, On average, white collar workers spend six weeks per year looking for information they already have. We are talking here about the average worker, not particularly disorganised people, and about information they already have.

This is about the document we received via email a while ago and we are looking for. We scroll down in our inbox, going quickly through hundreds of emails to search for the document, getting more and more frustrated because we do not find it. We then realise we probably saved this document in one of our multiple sub-folders. We open a few, unsuccessfully trying to remember.

We then vaguely remember printing a copy of it. We go through our desk, searching through files of papers, with no success.

How many of us can relate to this?

I certainly could. I am naturally a hoarder, and was finding it hard to throw things away and therefore it was difficult to find things.

When I work with executives of large companies, one of the first things I ask them to do is to tidy their desk and their soft files. It is sometimes very challenging for these highly paid executives to suddenly have to go through all their documents and carry out a big purge, prune and file. But when I ask them if getting at least two or three weeks back per year by having a more organised filing system is worth the effort, they suddenly agree its worth it.

The idea is to implement a workflow management system that will make you more efficient. You will save a lot of time and will be more focused on the information you really need the information which will help you to progress in your role, not the things that could distract you.

Lets be clear on what we are about to do. We are about to completely reorganise your filing system. We are about to start a big purge and prune of all these documents on your desk, in your filing cabinets and deep drawers, in your personal drives and email folders. We are about to get rid of all those documents you do not need.

We are about to decide what filing system will work for you and agree on a few rules to make sure you will keep on top of it forever. And when I say forever, I really mean it. At Primary Asset Consulting we have worked with many people and we often come back to visit them a few months or even years after, pleased to discover that the vast majority of participants have kept on top of their filing system.