What are your best and worst habits?
My best habit is getting up early in the morning and doing some Pilates with Nicole (on YouTube) 15 to 20 minutes. Worst habit: the small bowl of cereal I ate at 10 p.m. My wife told me it wasn’t a good idea, so I stopped.
What do you do when you need to come up with an idea?
I’m going mountain biking alone in Oka.
What word can you no longer stand?
As I often work in English, I would say We should. We should. It happens during team meetings. You’re the boss and everyone around you says “we should do this, we should do this.” Who is the “we”? Am I the one who has to take all the “we should”?
How do you unplug?
With my grandchildren; I have a two and a half year old granddaughter and a two month old little boy. But I mostly unplug by skiing in the woods in Mont-Tremblant. This is what bothers me the most. 1er January and Easter, with my three children and their partners, we usually go there. Just being in the woods in the bumps, there is a euphoria that comes. Often a friend of mine joins us with his family. We let the rest of the group go and we both end up together. It is a moment of great satisfaction.
What book do you usually recommend?
It’s Your Ship, written by D. Michael Abrashoff. He is a warship captain in the Pacific Fleet. When he took the ship, there were 330 sailors and it was the worst ship in the American Pacific Fleet. In two years he converted the boat and it became the best boat. The entire process towards this success is well explained. At AWS, our company culture is focused on innovation and customer need. One day, I had an important promotion with an assigned mentor and I asked him if he had a book to recommend to me. He told me : ” It’s Your Ship is the best book on leadership I have read. » Later, I decided to give everyone on my team a budget to buy this book. We then did a team reflection and it was very interesting.
What advice are you glad you ignored?
In the 1990s, I was in sales and wanted to go into wireless. I did not have project management skills to apply for this position that interested me. My boss at the time didn’t want me to apply either. But I applied anyway. At the interview, the person told me: “You have no skills for the position. » But I managed to convince her and it propelled my career. I worked in Paris, Hong Kong and England. When I returned to Canada, I had acquired global skills and managed employees from different cultures. How had I managed to convince her? By emphasizing that during my engineering studies, I had to manage different engineering projects, so that I had skills in that area.
What do you always carry in your bag?
My NEXUS card.
Do you impose a “dress code” on yourself at work?
I’m so happy, because since I joined AWS, I wear jeans 99% of the time. It’s the company culture. When we are on the biggest stands, we wear clean jeans, a shirt and a jacket. If our president dresses that way when he’s on stage, it sends the message that it’s appropriate to dress that way.
Do you have a favorite item on your desk?
When I participated in multiple job interviews to work at AWS, the last manager I interviewed with, the boss based in Seattle, told me: “You live in Blainville, how are you going to manage the company there? » I replied: “I can have a thousand photos of my family on my cell phone compared to three photos of my family on my desk. My cell phone is my office. » He started laughing and said to me: “You can work from wherever you want! » Since that time, I have always stayed in Montreal and I travel.
A good boss is someone who…
Don’t micromanage. The manager must listen to his employees, provide coaching, help them learn, be authentic and passionate.
Who is Réjean Bourgault?
Born in Montreal, he spent his youth in his father’s electronics parts stores and obtained his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Sherbrooke in 1988.
The following year, Réjean Bourgault began his career at Nortel. During his 21 years with the company, he held management positions in Paris, Hong Kong and Canada. In particular, he will lead the support and development of the great digitalization of networks in Canada, the development of the foundation of the Internet and the world of wireless (2G-3G network).
In 2009, he co-founded the company 5Deka, a think tank on digital megatrends.
From 2010 to 2017, he held management positions at Avaya, specializing in corporate communications.
He joined AWS in 2017, a few months after the opening of the first Canadian region of AWS data centers in Montreal, which today allows tens of thousands of Canadian organizations to host and to process their data locally.
Réjean Bourgault is married, father of three children of the cybergeneration and twice a grandfather.
reference: www.lapresse.ca