The room goes quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
Numbers are on the screen. Everyone has seen them before the meeting started, which is precisely the problem. The CEO clears his throat, ready to explain away another missed quarter, and waits for someone to fill the silence the way silence always gets filled in rooms like this: with a plan, a slide, a reassurance.
Nobody moves.
Somewhere at the end of the table, a person who has said almost nothing for the last twenty minutes finally speaks. Not with an answer. With a question that nobody in that building has asked out loud in over a year. The kind of question that makes three executives suddenly find something urgent to write down, because writing buys time, and time is what they need before they answer honestly.
That is the moment this story is actually about.
Meet Bruno Jestin
Bruno Jestin is the founder of Alemona, a firm he built after thirty years running global industrial businesses worth up to €600 million across five continents for Solvay, Syensqo, and Peróxidos do Brasil. CEOs call him when the spreadsheets have stopped explaining the problem. What defines him is not the size of the P&Ls he managed. It is his conviction that the biggest lever in any negotiation, turnaround, or stalled business is rarely the strategy on the table. It is the question nobody in the room has been willing to ask.
The Long Apprenticeship in Complexity
Jestin trained as an engineer at ENSEM in France, the kind of technical foundation that teaches a person to trust systems and numbers. Industry, as it turned out, would teach him something the classroom never could: that numbers only tell you what already happened.
His early years at Solvay moved him through supply chain, purchasing, and plant operations in Sarralbe, then into sales and marketing for the Chlorinated Organic Products business. Between 2002 and 2006, he took that unit from negative four percent EBITDA to plus thirty-five percent. It was his first real proof that a business in decline was not a business without options. It was a business asking the wrong questions of itself.
Promotions followed across Brussels, São Paulo, and Lyon. As CEO of Peróxidos do Brasil, he nearly doubled EBITDA against an aggressive new competitor by building manufacturing units closer to customers, an idea that reframed the entire value conversation. As Global Silica Executive VP, he delivered record EBITDA in 2019 and steered the business through the pandemic without losing ground. At Syensqo, facing brutal Asian competition, he pushed EBITDA up one hundred fifty percent against trend.
Each posting sharpened the same instinct. The technical solution was rarely the constraint. The constraint was almost always human: pride, habit, or a conversation everyone had been avoiding. By the time he left Syensqo in 2024, he had learned to spot that gap faster than almost anyone in the room, and Alemona became his way of putting that instinct to work for other leaders.
The Art of the Unasked Question
Jestin does not describe himself as a consultant. “I’m a catalyst for clarity, enabling leaders in complex industries turn pressure into progress,” he says, and the distinction matters. Consultants arrive with frameworks. Jestin arrives with questions, then waits.
Early in his career, he negotiated what he believed was a clean win-win with a Russian factory owner: an efficiency overhaul in exchange for roughly a million dollars and product rights. The economics were sound. The CEO said nothing, then weeks later offered Jestin’s own deputy a job, in front of him, for that same sum. “I hadn’t lost the deal because my proposal was wrong,” he reflects. “I’d lost it because I had made the wrong person feel like they were losing.” It reshaped how he reads a room before he ever discusses numbers.
That lesson resurfaced during a client lunch years later, when a Business Unit President asked him point blank whether Alemona would sue if the customer walked away from a contract. Jestin finished his bite, set down his fork, and answered plainly. The posturing stopped immediately. “The possibility of going to court is often what lets you avoid going there,” he says.
His most repeated tool is even simpler than confrontation. When a CEO client had spent months chasing an acquisition riddled with red flags but couldn’t walk away, Jestin asked one naive question: if you were seeing this for the first time today, would you still choose it? The CEO abandoned the deal within days and called it one of his best decisions that year.
The pattern holds across his 2021 work through the raw material crisis, when he and his financial controller stepped back from daily cost panic to ask what the business was actually exposed to. The result was a record year in 2022. “When finance helps shape tomorrow’s decisions, it becomes one of the strongest competitive advantages a business can have,” he says. In every case, the breakthrough arrived not from analysis, but from the discipline to stop and ask something uncomfortable first.
The Jestin Playbook: 5 Lessons
Sell ownership, not a transaction. People do not resist good ideas. They resist feeling like the idea’s execution belongs to someone else.
Let silence do the negotiating. The person who fills a pause first usually reveals more than the person who waits it out.
Ask what you would choose starting from scratch today. Sunk cost dies the moment you remove the history from the question.
State your boundaries before you need them. Ambiguity about consequences invites more posturing, not less.
Check what customers actually pay for, not what you assume impresses them. Superior service that nobody will pay extra for is a cost, not an advantage.
Turning Pressure Into Traction
Back in that quiet room, the question finally lands. It does not solve anything by itself. It simply removes the cover that had let the real problem hide for a year, and once that cover is gone, decisions that felt impossible an hour earlier suddenly become obvious.
That is the work Jestin has built his second career around: not arriving with the answer, but staying quiet long enough for the room to find one it had been avoiding.
Some of the most expensive silences in business are the ones nobody was brave enough to sit inside.
Bruno Jestin is the Founder and Principal of Alemona, an independent advisory firm based in Lyon, France. He works with industrial CEOs and executive teams navigating turnarounds, margin pressure, and organizational transformation.
