Credits: Jérémie Boketshu; landscape-format adaptation by Ecostylia Media.
He spent nearly forty years in the shadow of the powerful, where their words are shaped before they speak. A veteran of strategic communications who ran the function at major French companies, Frédéric Fougerat knows what leaders no longer hear and what their advisers keep quiet. Between a CEO and a communications director, he believes, nothing should be off-limits, just as between a defendant and their lawyer. In our conversation, he takes us inside the C-suite and spells out the price of candor. He also describes crises that take shape long before they erupt, and executives who have become media outlets in their own right. One question runs beneath every answer: when a simple AI prompt can produce a comms plan, what is left for communications professionals?
From Independent Radio to the C-Suite
Frédéric Fougerat got his start behind a microphone. From 1985 to 1987, he worked at France’s newly legalized independent radio stations, including Radio Enghien, where he held several roles at once. He then joined the offices of local elected officials and members of the French Parliament, where he stayed for about fifteen years.
In 2003, he moved into business. He went on to lead communications for staffing group Vedior, oilfield-services firm Geoservices, drugmaker Ethypharm, engineering consultancy Altran, catering group Elior, and finally property manager Foncia, now Emeria. He sat on executive committees, advised CEOs, and navigated crises. In 2022, he founded Tenkan Paris, an agency specializing in crisis communication, image, and reputation. The following year, he launched Cogiteurs, a collective of communications directors, with Agathe Weil and Benoît Repoux.
And yet, at school, he was always told he was “hopeless at French.” Since then, he has published nine books. The latest, C’est de la com! – 60 idées reçues (roughly, “That’s Just Spin! 60 Misconceptions”), defends a profession often reduced to artifice.
He describes for us committees where everyone comes to justify their place. He speaks of executives told to be reachable at all hours and disagreements carefully smoothed over. His perspective also puts leaders on the spot: what is a decision worth when no one dares discuss the reasons behind it?
The Interview
Interview conducted at The Peninsula, in Paris, on September 11, 2026.
Communication Facing Reality
Pierre-Antoine Tsady: Your book is called C’est de la com!, roughly “That’s just spin!” Why does that phrase still discredit your profession? Are communications professionals partly responsible?
Frédéric Fougerat: That phrase discredits an entire profession in order to criticize those who misuse it. It often targets politicians who favor a splashy announcement over the announcement of facts. Yet political communication is only one part of our profession. It is also essential to democratic life.
Communications professionals do bear some responsibility: too few of us communicate about communication. Communication brings together very different jobs, with artistic, legal, and technical dimensions. A web designer, a financial communications director, and a press officer all serve a strategy with distinct skills.
We also confuse qualities with skills, as if having an opinion were enough to know the job. Some people mistake creative work for recreational work. Organizing an event is not the same as being invited to that event! Sometimes people without any particular skill are placed in these roles, and then we’re surprised that communicators are seen as bad at what they do.
Finally, communication is judged by what is visible: the end result. All the work of understanding, analysis, writing, and concept development remains invisible. Our role is not to make tools, but to produce intelligence. That is why communication is a strategic function, not a support service.
P.-A. T.: Communication aims to shape how people see things. Where is the line between telling the truth about reality and distorting it?
F. F.: A communicator’s role is not to distort reality. A journalist seeks out facts that make it possible to understand a situation and form an opinion. A communicator draws attention to certain aspects in order to present a favorable view of what they are responsible for promoting.
But lying, disguising, or falsifying things leads to crisis. You risk destroying your own credibility and reputation. I have never supported those practices. Today, a lie can be exposed very quickly.
Excessive preparation can also strip away authenticity. I see executives who are so well drilled that they wear a mechanical smile, no matter the question. I believe that insincerity can be felt.
P.-A. T.: Are some outstanding companies held back by their communication?
F. F.: I prefer to devote my energy to admiring those that stand out for their communication. I can cite Groupe Cheval, a French civil-engineering and land-development group. What interests me about it is the consistency between what it says and what it does. It links territorial development with the preservation of the environment.
I also think of Orange in Africa and the Middle East. I see concrete local actions there, on which communication can rely. That work builds roots in the countries concerned and can protect the company when a crisis hits. You don’t start thinking about that relationship the day everything goes wrong.
Power and Contradiction
P.-A. T.: After nearly forty years alongside leaders, what have you learned about power? Has communication itself become a form of power?
F. F.: Power is as much a question of responsibility as of political sense. Political sense is, to me, an essential quality in a communicator. They must observe and listen before speaking, understand formal and informal relationships, people, and context.
A communicator is a receiver of emotions before being a transmitter. Communication gives power, even if some people fear it takes power away. It will not overshadow leaders. On the other hand, staying in the shadows for lack of communication can cost them their influence. In a crisis, a bad reputation can be more damaging than poor service or a faulty product.
P.-A. T.: What distinguishes a great leader?
F. F.: The ability to surround themselves with people more competent than they are, each in their own field. A great boss does not know everything better than everyone else. They listen, accept disagreement, then decide, because they will have to stand behind their choices.
They also know how to delegate, meaning they accept that someone else will do things differently. They set goals, provide the means, then focus on vision and strategy.
If you think you’re a better communicator than your communications director, why did you hire them?
P.-A. T.: The higher you go, the less others dare speak to you frankly? How do you avoid that isolation?
F. F.: The higher you are, the more isolated you become, with a court and courtiers. Leaders realize it to varying degrees, but they do not all react the same way. Some accept it, others regret it or try to change things.
It is up to the leader to go to others. I have always worked with an open office, right up until I moved into an open-plan space. In the morning, I would walk around my teams and greet each person by looking them in the eye. That contact lets you sense fatigue or difficulty. It is also a step toward the other person, so they can later come to you and talk.
At one company, my assistant was absent from my first team meeting. She explained that assistants were not allowed to attend. I told her she was part of the team. The next time, she sat behind the others, thinking she had no place at the table.
To me, everyone had to be around the table, whatever their role or status.
P.-A. T.: How far should a communications director be able to say no to the CEO?
F. F.: A great boss must be able to hear an unpleasant truth. The relationship with their communications director is like that of a defendant and their lawyer. They must be able to say everything to each other, freely. But their exchanges must remain between them. That requires trust, intellectual complicity, and professional authority on both sides.
The communicator must be frank and know how to say no, explaining why. Then they must respect the leader’s final decision, whether it follows their recommendations or not. The leader, for their part, must acknowledge their mistakes. They cannot make communications responsible for a bad choice when they did not follow the advice.
In politics, communications often ends up paying for the leader. When the performance is successful, the leader claims not to have been advised. When it goes badly, communicators are blamed.
P.-A. T.: When interests diverge, where does your loyalty lie: with the leader who trusts you or with the company you serve?
F. F.: We could turn the question around: toward whom could we be disloyal? There is a real dilemma. That said, I think I would always be more loyal to a leader than to an organization. Fortunately, I have never had to make that choice.
That loyalty probably comes from my past as chief of staff to elected officials. It also stems from the importance I give to trust. My conduct continues to be guided by the need to be professional and honest. After that, it is up to each person to decide conscientiously.
Deciding and Letting Go
P.-A. T.: How have executive committees changed since you started? Do they still really make decisions?
F. F.: Thirty-five years ago, in an executive or management committee, the people in the room looked at one another and listened to one another. Today, they tend to stare at their phone or computer and wait for their turn to speak.
People come less to learn from others and exchange ideas than to deliver their own narrative. Often, the goal is to demonstrate one’s usefulness and justify one’s place in the org chart. It feels to me more like a group of embedded freelancers than a leadership team.
I also see fewer agendas and fewer decisions at the end of meetings. “I’ll take it under advisement” often really means: I’m proposing that we postpone the topic, which avoids deciding and moving forward.
Fortunately, not every committee works that way. My experience is limited to the ones I attended. Much depends on the professional authority, managerial qualities, and intentions of the person chairing them. Is it a true place of power and decision-making, or just a routine for animating a team that is not really being led?
P.-A. T.: Are executives freer than they used to be, or subject to new forms of conformity?
F. F.: I’m not sure they are freer. They may be less subject to a certain kind of authority, but conformity has changed its face. Yesterday, you were expected to be competent and obedient. Today, you have to be agile, positive, resilient, collaborative, committed, aligned. Qualities take the form of constant injunctions.
There is conformity in vocabulary: transformation, disruption, inclusion, purpose, collective intelligence. Sometimes these words are used to avoid naming the real problems. Franglais, French stuffed with English buzzwords, becomes mandatory to sound more “business.” You end up saying you are “en call dans un meeting pour incentiver la team sur les sales.” Anyone who does not go along with it is out of the game.
There is also conformity of availability: being reachable at any hour, responding immediately, displaying your activity. It becomes a kind of modern slavery, where responsiveness is confused with effectiveness. The right to disconnect exists in the rhetoric. In practice, we deny ourselves that right in order to live to the rhythm of notifications.
The conformity of image requires smoothing over disagreements and displaying permanent success. Doubt, fragility, failure, or contradiction are then treated as presentation flaws.
Finally, managerial virtue signaling dictates not offending, upsetting, or questioning too directly. We celebrate diversity of backgrounds much less than diversity of opinions. We recruit talent, but manage it as competencies.
P.-A. T.: So how do you recognize a free executive?
F. F.: Freedom in an organization does not mean being able to say anything. It means saying what needs to be said, when it needs to be said, without fearing for your future. That requires exercising the responsibilities and professional authority for which you were hired.
An executive who can no longer challenge, raise alarms, or think in a distinctive way is not free. They have become an expert in the art of conforming with a smile.
P.-A. T.: And you, which management belief have you changed your mind about?
F. F.: It’s not my beliefs that changed, but my management practice. I learned a great deal from the leaders I worked with and supported, on two major points.
My ability to delegate was close to zero at the start of my career. I came to understand that what mattered was the goal reached, not the path taken. Differences in method mattered little to me as long as the desired result was achieved.
I also learned to hire people better than me in their specialty. That allowed me to devote myself fully to my mission. It kept me from the micromanagement that poisons teams.
Crisis Communication: Preserving Trust
P.-A. T.: What first sign makes you fear a leader is mishandling a crisis?
F. F.: That they speak instead of listening to me.
I recently worked with four leaders who were remarkably humble. They wanted to be challenged and truly listened. They came to learn from me, not to explain my own job to me. That’s part of what makes a great boss, too.
P.-A. T.: After all the crises you’ve worked on, what can still surprise you?
F. F.: I’m not surprised that often anymore. Stupidity or inhumanity can still shock me. And when a crisis leaves victims in horrible circumstances, it remains very hard.
Managing a crisis means managing other people’s emotions, but first your own. The best crisis communicator is not necessarily the smartest. It is certainly the one with the most experience, the one who avoids being caught off guard and keeps a cool head.
P.-A. T.: What destroys a reputation more: the original mistake or the leader’s response?
F. F.: A crisis is not necessarily caused by a mistake. But when a mistake triggers it, the leader’s communication can determine how much damage is done. Reputation is often destroyed when the very people who were supposed to protect it give people another reason not to trust them.
An error can be acknowledged, explained, and repaired. A reputation can survive a mistake. It survives the lie, denial, arrogance, or manipulation much less easily.
Those involved do not necessarily expect a flawless leader. They expect someone accountable, who looks at the facts, decides, and learns from mistakes.
Crisis communication must not become an exercise in narcissistic self-protection for the leader. Trust must be preserved through truth and the company’s core interests through decisions. That requires determining what must be preserved, what can be sacrificed, and what can be rebuilt.
P.-A. T.: When does silence legitimately protect the company? When does it become concealment?
F. F.: It is a question of economic interests and ethics before it is a question of communication. Confidentiality protects information that cannot, or should not, be made public. It may involve personal data, a trade secret, an ongoing procedure, or a sensitive negotiation. It responds to an obligation or a legitimate interest.
Strategic silence means not saying everything in order not to compromise an action, an investigation, or to fuel the crisis. It must not be used to sidestep the truth. It is a decision that one must be ready to revisit as the situation evolves.
Concealment prevents understanding of a fact that the people concerned are entitled to know. It distorts, hides, or delays essential information in order to avoid responsibility.
Information can be delayed, but reality must never be falsified. Otherwise, you risk fueling the crisis or creating another one. You should never lie, even if you are not required to say everything.
P.-A. T.: What is at stake before a crisis, in the relationship with customers?
F. F.: I knew a restaurant brand that had to deal with the circulation of an old video. We had factual information about the measures taken, but that was not enough to make the noise die down.
Customers, members of a community we had been nurturing for a long time, then defended the brand without being asked. That work of content creation and community management paid off. It had created a relationship.
A leader may think social media are useless and refuse to devote resources to them. But in a crisis, all the work done beforehand can prove very useful. Communication is also an investment, like insurance.
Executive Communications: When the Leader Becomes the Media
P.-A. T.: On LinkedIn, is a leader’s personal audience an asset for the company or a governance risk?
F. F.: The company’s image and reputation are intangible assets. The leader’s audience contributes to them according to their popularity, visibility, and influence. A message delivered by the leader generally has more impact than institutional communication, which is cold by nature.
A leader who has become media is therefore generally an asset, especially if that media serves the company. Things get more complicated when they speak on outside topics that may clash with the organization’s narrative or interests. Mixing genres is rarely beneficial.
Their speaking must be consistent and coordinated with the company’s. The communicator’s role is to keep control of the message. Any free or uncoordinated speaking represents a risk, especially in a crisis.
P.-A. T.: When their team writes for them, is it still the leader’s voice?
F. F.: Some leaders manage their LinkedIn account on their own. Others delegate all or part of it to a colleague or a team. It can be hard to know who is posting.
It is the same with speeches or opinion pieces: some write them, others have them written. The message belongs to the person who delivers or signs it, not to those who wrote it for them.
P.-A. T.: Can an executive still be excellent at their job without working on visibility?
F. F.: It depends on their need. The first question to ask is: why communicate? Without intention or a story to tell, there is no reason to do it.
Many people today need to communicate; others probably do not. Communicating is not about making noise or trying to exist: it has to answer an intention.
P.-A. T.: You are very present on social media yourself. What role does your image play in what you want to convey?
F. F.: There have been times when I got tired of seeing my face whenever I communicated. And yet, a somewhat weak message with my photo gets far more engagement than a very useful message without it.
When you want to share and promote your profession, you want it to be useful. But without my photo, the message lands less well.
My first book suffered from that. My publisher issued it because of my visibility on social media, but my photo was not on the cover. When he handed it to me, he admitted the mistake: without my face, they wouldn’t sell it. The book was reissued under another title, Le goût des autres, with my photo on the cover. It did much better.
Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
P.-A. T.: If artificial intelligence can produce a speech or a press release, where will the communicator’s value lie?
F. F.: Its true value is strengthened, because it concentrates on advice: producing intelligence. AI moves it away from its execution role, from making the tools.
There is still a transition to go through, and it is and will be damaging. Some leaders do not understand the value of communication or what is at stake in it. Others simply lack resources. They will sometimes prefer illusion to professionalism. But I think the situation will correct itself over time.
There can be no quality artificial intelligence without real intelligence. The person who asks the best questions of AI will be the one with the broadest general knowledge. You need to know how to formulate an intention, specify expectations, identify the biases to avoid, and then analyze the result.
General knowledge is becoming a major skill. It allows you to direct AI and, above all, not let it direct you.
P.-A. T.: Faced with the abundance of machine-generated text, will the real luxury be still having something original to say?
F. F.: AI is a mathematical machine. It generates, but it does not know why it generates. It has no emotion or judgment. It suggests, proposes, and puts forward hypotheses, but it does not decide.
It will still need real intelligence to function and to be used better, for a long time, I hope. The real luxury will remain our ability to mobilize that intelligence to produce the best with AI. Others will use it out of laziness, to create an illusion.
P.-A. T.: Your book dismantles sixty received ideas. Which conviction could become, in ten years, your own sixty-first received idea?
F. F.: Perhaps the idea that artificial intelligence will never replace communicators. I think those who do not use AI will be replaced by those who master the tool.
But who is really to say that AI won’t one day make decisions for us?
Further Reading: Books and Career Milestones
Frédéric Fougerat’s Books: Nine Publications
Published by Bréal on November 6, 2025, C’est de la com! – 60 idées reçues revisits the prejudices aimed at the profession. The book extends a series devoted to communication practices and workplace relationships. The publisher’s bibliography makes it possible to find the titles currently in the catalog. All of his books are published in French.
- 2017 — Un manager au cœur de l’entreprise, Studyrama.
- 2018 — Le goût des autres – Mes recettes de manager, Bréal.
- 2020 — Un dircom n’est pas un démocrate, Bréal.
- 2021 — Le dico de la com – Dictionnaire de référence des mots de la communication, Studyrama.
- 2021 — Copropriété – 50 questions essentielles, with Marc Ezrati, Bréal.
- 2021 — La com est un métier, Bréal.
- 2024 — Anthologie de la com – Paroles de dircom, Bréal.
- 2024 — L’élégance n’est pas une option – Questions de management, Bréal.
- 2025 — C’est de la com! – 60 idées reçues, Bréal.
Le goût des autres reuses a selection of texts from the first book, expanded with new opinion pieces: it is the edition reissued with his photo on the cover. To go further with this interview, Un dircom n’est pas un démocrate develops his view of the profession. L’élégance n’est pas une option addresses a manager’s responsibility and relationships within teams.
A Few Career Milestones
- 1985–1987 — stint in independent radio. In our interview, he recalls two years at Radio Enghien, where he held several roles at once.
- 1987–2002 — roles with local elected officials and members of the French Parliament.
- 2003–2022 — communications leadership in several groups, from Vedior to Foncia, which became Emeria, including Geoservices, Ethypharm, Altran, and Elior.
- 2022 — creation of Tenkan Paris, specializing in crisis communication, image, and reputation.
- 2023 — launch of Cogiteurs with Agathe Weil and Benoît Repoux, a collective of communications directors.
- 2025 — publication of C’est de la com! – 60 idées reçues.