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Tishler: Tell us about your internship and what sparked your interest. Why this project?
Bodson: [I first thought] about this internship in October 2001, when President Joseph Kabila came to campus and asked Dean Clark if a team could help him on the reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). When Kabila's father (Laurent Kabila) was murdered a few months earlier, he was asked to take over the leadership of a country of 53 million inhabitants living on less that $100 U.S. per year.
Over the last ten weeks, we have been working [on our action plan for the Democratic Republic of Congo] on two main parts: first, we have analyzed the potential competitiveness of the main industries, and based on that, proposed an industry prioritization and concrete actions steps in terms of governmental assistance and/or protection removal. Second, we have dug into the zillions of problems raised by the industrials, prioritized them trying to isolate the symptoms from the root causes, and proposed a concrete action plan to the Ministers.
| …the team's motivation is at its maximum: a sort of permanent obsession… to put this country back on its feet occupies our mind at any single second. |
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— Bertrand Bodson, intern, Democratic Republic of the Congo |
We get a surprisingly high autonomy and direct access to the Ministers, to the CEOs of the largest companies (scared to death of losing their protection against importers), to ambassadors, bankers, smugglers…The industrial companies still alive can be counted on the fingers of the hands though, and barely operate at 25 percent capacity on average. Which is threatening for a country that counts more than 50 million inhabitants, and which is larger than Western Europe. The effect of the policy over the last decades, the pillages in the 1990s and the current war (a peace treaty—another one—was signed [in July]) are shockingly visible in the street.
Q: What's a typical day like? Who do you work with?
Bodson: Every single day is an adventure. Every morning, I wonder if I will end up in jail or with the President in the evening. It is hardly exaggerated…[I'll take one story, of many, for example.] Hearing about corruption, one of the diseases of this country, and illegal imports in particular, [my colleague] and I wanted to be able to judge by ourselves and went to one of the entry points between Brazaville and Kinshasa, via the Congo river. What we saw even surpassed our imagination: old ladies were openly bribing policemen and walked through with fabrics coming straight from Malaysia. Others tried to run to avoid paying… Also, an entire association of handicapped people are 'hired' by the importers to hide the products in a special compartment under their wheelchairs, and thus in all tranquility go through customs in total illegality. My colleague and I…were 'kindly' asked by the inspectors to leave the zone immediately, so that they can continue their 'honest' work far from these indiscreet eyes. This scene happens day after day, reducing the State revenues by several hundreds of millions every year, killing the local industry…and old ladies who try to survive as they can.
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We have had the chance to be exposed to a wide variety of economic actors in the Congo: from the government, but mostly business managers, Ambassadors, company federations, importers, and even smugglers. On top of being invited by the President, our "Harvard" passport has been very useful to get access to many of these people.
We have also worked closely with the World Bank…and the IMF. And, luckily, we got the intellectual and moral support, as well as contacts from Professor Wells who helps us see through the fog each time we get lost in front of the huge amount of problems faced by the Congo…
Q: Did your HBS class work impact your experience?
Bodson: BGIE was clearly the most helpful (surprising to have to admit that for someone like me who was so much purely western business-focused). It gave me the necessary frame of reference to organize my thinking. However, things were much easier in the classroom than they are here on the field. It was so much easier to be bold in class and to pretend that you knew the remedy for a country...
This said, I must admit that it is exactly when we started being lost that the confidence gained by reading case after case, country analysis after country analysis, became most valuable. It is at that particular moment that you remember that, once you have done the analysis, the important thing is to trust your first instinct and to propose actions (as long as you align them with your diagnostic and goal… And in a country like the Congo, the important thing is to have courage to be bold and to act…
Q: What business lessons, or personal lessons, did you take away from this internship?
Bodson: People had warned me before leaving: "This experience in the Congo is going to change your perception of the world." Yeah yeah…I didn't really believe them. I am too rational for that, and too driven towards specific business goals, at least for the next few years. Approaching the end of these ten weeks, I realize that they were right. I'm starting to understand what they really meant. Some of what I thought were deeply rooted values of mine, what I thought really mattered to me, is changing.
An HBS student syndrome is to struggle for years without knowing exactly what one wants to do professionally. This experience is definitely not going to help me. Paradoxically, this happened to me just when I started to become clear (or at least I almost had managed to convince myself) about what I wanted to do in my life. Thank you Congo…