Robert Salmon

Robert Salmon, an adventurer at heart, is a French businessman, writer and futurist. In another era, he would have been exploring the wild frontiers or settling trading posts beyond the great seas. As a top manager of L’Oréal, the famous French multinational company dedicated to the beauty of women (and men), he became an explorer 20th century style.

A graduate from l’Insead and Stanford University, his passion for « unfamiliar cultures » started during an initiation journey in India as a young man and continued as the director of the luxury goods department. Robert Salmon can report numerous tales on the major challenges and epic moments that accompanied the conquest of exotic and novel markets: USSR, USA, China, Japan… The life of this great traveler - 300.000 km every year during more then forty years - is full of uncommon experiences and encounters. In 1991, as he becomes L’Oréal’s vice-chairman, prospective research opens up for him new fields of interest.

Before and after his retirement in 1997, as a respected futurist and member of the World Future Society, he wrote around ten books and participated in many more. Two of his current main concerns are humanism and the differences between "to be" and "to have". Or - in other terms - how to balance our inner and outer selves to fulfill our lives, which is much more than just to "succeed in life".