Our Team

Jean-Baptiste COCHETEUX, Founder & President

A graduate of HEC and holder of a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Economics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Jean-Baptiste has spent nearly 20 years in senior HR and Talent Management leadership roles across both French and international scopes (notably Europe, the BRICS countries and Africa).

Drawing on his experience within large corporations and SMEs, he has founded and implemented a pragmatic and innovative vision of Talent Management in support of agile transformation. His approach addresses a key challenge: how to move from a “traditional” HR model—administrative and often siloed—to a truly strategic, measurable and steerable HR business partnership, designed to equip organizations with an agile ecosystem and practices.

As a holistic initiative involving all stakeholders, agile transformation is orchestrated by an HR function that is more business-oriented than ever—enabling organizations to continuously adapt to change, win and retain customer preference.

Esméralda DI TRAPANI, Managing Partner

With academic training in Social Law, Human Resources and Employment Law, Esmeralda has built her career in recruitment and human resources consulting within leading firms. She specializes in the recruitment and support of executives and senior leaders (Sales, Operations, Performance, Marketing, etc.), particularly in the industrial and services sectors. She has developed a distinctive, highly predictive approach to recruitment, grounded in the assessment of agility—defined as both the ability and the willingness to continuously adapt to change while actively contributing to it.

Through her professional practice, she combines Talent Acquisition and Talent Management within an integrated approach—identifying and retaining agile talent—to support agile transformation, a key differentiating strength of AGILE EXEC.

Find out more

Jean-Baptiste, could you share your definition of agility?

Agility can be summed up in a simple question: ‘What do I do when I don’t know how to do it?’
It describes a person’s ability to adapt — and to learn quickly and autonomously — when faced with new, complex or unexpected situations.

How do they react? How do they learn? How do they ‘land on their feet’, for example to deliver performance in all circumstances?

You place all your added value and differentiation on agility — but what do you actually mean by that?

Agility is first and foremost a mindset, structured around four measurable dimensions, assessed through a methodology that enables us to anticipate how an individual will react when faced with new or unexpected situations.

It then requires a rethinking of HR practices, particularly in the identification and selection of talent — as was the case during the launch of the oncology business at Boehringer Ingelheim, where we identified the most agile employees.

Finally, agility is embedded through managerial practices designed to sustainably anchor adaptability within the culture and DNA of the organization.

I don’t really see how you differentiate yourself from other consulting firms?

Beyond an agility-based methodology, the real difference lies in the experience I bring: a career spanning both consulting and in-house roles, publicly listed groups and family-owned businesses, where I have been able to build and test this approach in very concrete terms — particularly in demanding industrial environments.

Can you explain your approach, shaped by your professional experience and the conviction you have built through hands-on practice?

I built this approach empirically over the course of my career, facing complex recruitment and transformation challenges, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. From this experience, I developed the conviction that in an increasingly uncertain environment—where skills become obsolete ever more quickly—agility is a far better predictor of potential than traditional models, which assess skills at a specific point in time.

This conviction is now further reinforced by the rise of artificial intelligence, which is accelerating the transformation of roles and professions even more.

Why choose Agile EXEC over other consulting firms?

Most recruitment firms — which I know well, having founded Ad Hominem twenty years ago, led and commissioned many of them, and also experienced them as a candidate — ultimately offer very similar approaches: little originality, limited risk-taking on profiles, and a primarily commercial posture, often without a true end-to-end vision.

My conviction is different: recruitment should be a lever for agile transformation of both the organization and its corporate culture.