Pernod-Ricard

<p><i><strong>From Mexico to Paris, meet Paola Hernández, Consumer Products Portfolio Director at Pernod Ricard headquarters. As a teenage girl, she had a dream. It now has become a fulfilling life in a French company where conviviality is everywhere!</strong></i></p><h1>Consumer Products Portfolio Director at Pernod Ricard Headquarters: Paola in Paris</h1><p>At the Paris headquarters of Pernod Ricard, Paola Hernández currently holds the role of Consumer Products Portfolio Director. She works in the technology department, where she’s responsible for the group’s marketing technologies. But she wasn’t always based in France: the eldest of a close-knit tribe of four children, Paola was born and raised in Mexico City. Although her family could be described as ‘traditional Latin’ in a patriarchal country, her father, a business owner, frequently took the young girl with him to meetings. There, she began to understand the ways of the business world and how things were done.</p><p>Her father got into tech and computing very early on. He was among the few to acquire a personal computer in Mexico in the 1980s. As a result, Paola developed a technological mind. And when the time came to choose her studies, she naturally turned to computer engineering.</p><p>For the first time, she faced the harsh reality of being a woman in the Tech world: at her predominantly male school, there were only a handful of female students. Anyway, the young woman had other ideas for her early adulthood: she wanted to enter the job market as soon as possible. At the age of 20, she joined a large soft drinks corporation as an intern before landing a job there. She worked hard, the first to arrive and the last to go home. Such qualities tend to stand out, and as a result, she was offered a position within the company’s regional team in Chile.</p><p>In Chile, not only was she the only woman: at 24, she was also the youngest member of the team! When your job involves traveling to implement global projects in male-centric Latin America, being young and female poses something of a double jeopardy. She often experienced the subtle gender bias that so commonly happens in the day-to-day life in the workplace.&nbsp;</p><p>Yet, she loved her job and was good at it. It was the dawn of social media. Paola passionately observed the impact of emerging technologies on new patterns and changes in consumer behavior. The marketing world was discovering audience interactions as a way to advertise their brands, and Paola understood the type of leverage these new marketing tools could offer a business.</p><p>She spent six years in Chile. But now, she was in her early 30s and felt it was time for a change. Back in Mexico, the company offered her the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in business administration. As usual, her environment was mostly all-male. However, this time, she was playing with Top Dogs entrepreneurs… Her high-potential profile in a multinational company gave her the credits that her upbringing wouldn’t and she fit well enough.&nbsp;<br>She learned a lot about entrepreneurship and herself during this period. It allowed her to review her career so far. She’d loved her years at her company, but she was willing to explore new territories And the time felt right: she was ready and eager for a new turn in her life.</p><p>One of her MBA co-students had started a solar panel company. He asked Paola to join the project. For her, it was a new challenge that addressed her own environmental concerns. She loved her time at a young, fast-paced, fast-moving startup, the opposite of the gigantic corporation she came from. But she lacked the kind of structured environment she knew she needed. When she was offered a position at Pernod Ricard, she immediately felt that she could find the best of both worlds there: not an oversized company, but still a successful group with exciting prospects.</p><p>In 2016, she joined Pernod Ricard in Mexico and began working there as a project manager for digital marketing and sales. Meet Paola Hernández: from Mexico to Paris, she always follows her heart, and never regrets it!</p><h2>Paola’s Early Years at Pernod Ricard in Mexico&nbsp;</h2><p>These first years at Pernod Ricard in Mexico were the happiest of my career up to that point.</p><h3>A French Flavor in Mexico</h3><p>I loved everything: the people, my working environment… The company’s key word is conviviality, and this is felt in the relationships between employees.</p><p>As a team we were on the smaller side and very close together. Because I had only known Latina culture, I wasn’t able to understand it right away, but I think even in our Mexican contexts I already felt a strong French vibe. As soon as I arrived, I started working with the Paris headquarters on digital projects, implementing tools designed in France and adapting them to our Latin American market.</p><p>Because I had worked on similar projects at my first company, this was right up my alley; maybe a little too much, even… I felt the need for more. And I was more and more curious about Europe. Strangely enough, in my early teens, I’d had this dream of me living in Paris. Not a young girl’s fantasy but some sort of premonition, almost.&nbsp;</p><h3>Touching the Dream</h3><p>And there I was, working in this French company with a strong European history. And all of a sudden, a position opened up in Paris! I applied on a whim…and it didn’t work out. I didn’t fit the job profile. I was told that I could apply for opportunities in Belgium, Germany or other European countries…</p><p>But I felt so close to living my once-forgotten dream… I resisted the idea of settling for anything other than Paris. And I was right: a year later, a new position opened up, and this time, I fit the profile perfectly. I applied, obviously, and after a few setbacks, here I was,&nbsp;<i>en route</i> for Paris.</p><h2>Pernod Ricard’s company culture: Conviviality</h2><p>For five years now, I have lived and worked in Paris, at the Pernod Ricard headquarters.</p><h3>Deploying Pernod Ricard’s Marketing Technologies</h3><p>In five years, my role within the company has grown considerably. It started as a team of one, myself, with the mission of deploying our marketing technology in Europe. Today, I’m responsible for all of the group’s marketing technology; Our technical department is behind many important aspects of Pernod Ricard’s business: from providing our marketing teams with tools for their consumer activities to the technology behind our websites or the ads consumers see on social media…</p><p>Living in Europe confirmed what I felt when I first joined Pernod Ricard. The environment is friendlier for women here. And perhaps this is due to the fact that, up to the group’s CIO, I work mainly with women? But I think it’s also a question of the general state of mind within Pernod Ricard. Back in Mexico, my director was a Brazilian. He was great. He could get straight to the point, but was very fair and open-minded.&nbsp;</p><p>However, given my cultural background and past experience, having a woman as CIO is something. It changes things. I see it even more now that she has become my N+2. Professional meetings with predominantly women create quite a different environment from the ones I was used to. It’s a balanced type of energy, and I like that very much.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><h3>Bringing Diversity in teams</h3><p>Although we work at the Paris headquarters, our environment is very diverse. Because we operate globally, we try to bring in different people from many countries and backgrounds. Here, everyone is able to work in English. It wasn’t always easy, I mean, we’re in France and, of course, there are a lot of French people here. At the beginning, we were just two foreigners: me and a Russian colleague with whom I had worked in Mexico and who had joined my team. For us to integrate better, our manager insisted that we all speak in English, and the French crew was willing to make the effort.</p><p>Bringing diversity in our workplace is even more important now, as we undergo major change. Hierarchy is absolutely hands down on the subject. We have this group within Pernod Ricard: Women in Technology. They’re extremely active and put a lot of work in raising awareness about bias and the importance of creating an ongoing conversation on the topic of DEI. In some companies in Mexico, gay people were accepted in theory, but in reality, not so much, and they kept themselves closeted. Policies are one thing, but it’s all about the people within a company, and their willingness to work on their biases and preconceived ideas.&nbsp;</p><h3>Openness as a Mindset</h3><p>Everything revolves around this fundamental value of Pernod Ricard: conviviality. This is the message we want to convey through all our brands, and to achieve this, we obviously must live it ourselves, within the company. One of our most renowned brands, Absolut, is a flagship of the LGBTQIA+ community. How could we not seek equality and inclusiveness for ourselves? At Pernod Ricard, no one is afraid to speak publicly about their significant other of the same gender.</p><h2>Women in the Tech Universe: Still a Long Road Ahead</h2><p>Even though I work in a company that is very sensitive to gender and equity issues, I know that we still have a long way to go to achieve parity.</p><h3>Then and Now</h3><p>Of course, women are more widely accepted in Tech, especially on the marketing side. Yet, when I was younger, the ratio of male to female engineers was very low, and I fear things haven’t changed much. Young girls must look for female figures and identify those women in the network who can help them. I’m not sure I like the term ‘role model’, but they need to find women who have walked the walk and done the work before them to show them that anything is possible.</p><h3>Look for the Outstretched Hand</h3><p>You’ll find that there’s always a woman willing to help, because she knows how hard it is. Contrary to popular belief, we want to help each other, see each other grow and thrive. We don’t want to see another woman give up because she thinks she doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in Tech, when in fact, she does. Try to identify these women in the network that can help you!</p><p>This happened to me early in my career. A woman from the Tech department of the headquarters office was visiting our team. There we were, in a typical dinner where the male participants were talking about football. She and I were sitting next to each other. So I dared to reach out and ask for advice: how did she manage in this world made for men? I was still so very young. She took interest in me, listened to me seriously and gave me advice.</p><p>Back to her base, she went out of her way to find me, and sent me a book:&nbsp;<i>Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman</i>. I still have it and it’s meaningful to me because it reminds me of her, and how she made me feel. Suddenly I wasn’t an alien anymore. And because she had made it, I felt like I could too. Suddenly, anything was possible…</p><h2>Five Years from Now</h2><p>Five years ago, I landed in Paris to live my childhood dream. Shortly after, I met a Frenchman. We had been dating for a few months when the pandemic hit. We made a bold move and decided to quarantine together. Talk about testing the waters! It worked: we have never separated since and we got married in 2022.</p><p>I am never afraid to embark on new adventures. I don’t want to become the next Top Dog. I don’t dream of job titles. Yes, my younger self thought that was what she wanted: power and climbing the corporate ladder. I tried hard and the more I tried, the less I achieved my goals. For years, I felt stuck. And then I stopped trying. I decided to let go of my eagerness and just enjoy the journey. From there, things started to happen and all seemed to fall in place. Not without effort, of course, but more naturally.</p><p>I don’t know where I will be in five years. Or ten, for that matter. With my husband, we don’t think that Paris is forever. But that’s all. We don’t have any other plans yet. When we retire, we would like to have a place near the beach somewhere; a place to go when it’s cold and wintery in Europe.</p><p>But retirement is still far, very far away. Meanwhile, the older I get, the more I know I want to give back, to be a mentor to young people and watch them grow. In the end, what remains of you in this world is what you give to others.</p>

Paola Hernández, Consumer Products Portfolio Director at Pernod Ricard

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