When Henri de Castries famously whisked his 250 top executives off to the Amazon basin for a bonding session, it was clear he intended to keep them on their toes.
"I made them cross a piranha-infested river," admits the chief executive of Axa, the insurance and asset management group, which owns Guardian PMPA, Ireland largest motor insurer.
The group's biennial "seminars" have become a tradition: under the leadership of Mr Claude Bebear, Axa's founder and now chairman, executives have bungee-jumped and camped on the Great Wall of China. But in the four months since Mr de Castries took over, he has shown he likes to do things his way; last week he announced transatlantic mergers and acquisitions worth almost $20 billion (€22.2 billion).
The deals include the $8.5 billion sale to Credit Suisse of Axa's 71 per cent stake in Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, the US investment bank.
The group also offered $10.4 billion in cash and shares to buy out the minority shareholders who still own 40 per cent of Axa Financial - formerly Equitable - the group's US fund management and insurance arm.
A descendant of Charles Eugene de la Croix de Castries, minister of the navy under Louis XVI, Mr de Castries seemed destined for a career in the French civil service. After graduating from ENA, the university that grooms the country's ruling elites, he served as a paratrooper in the army, before following the preferred enarque - or ENA graduate - career path of joining the finance ministry's prestigious treasury division.
Unlike the majority of his peers, Mr de Castries was not parachuted by the authorities into the top job at a private-sector company with strong connections to the state. Instead, he left the finance ministry, where he was handling the privatisation of state-owned companies such as CGE (now Alcatel), after meeting Mr Bebear in 1989.
The first move Mr de Castries will be judged on will be the disposal of DLJ, rather than a headline-grabbing takeover. Mr de Castries acknowledges that the future pace of external expansion is unlikely to match that of the past decade, during which Axa doubled in size every two or three years. "Axa walks on two legs," he says. "When you move one leg forward, by making an acquisition, for example, you then have to move the second leg - integration - before moving the first one again."
Having become the world's biggest insurer by income, with sales of €68 billion last year, Axa is entering a phase of consolidating its latest acquisitions - UAP, then France's largest insurer, acquired in 1997, and three UK companies bought last year, including GRE and Equity & Law.
"To double from our current size through acquisitions, we would have to make simultaneous bids for two of the world's largest companies in the sector," Mr de Castries says. Instead, he is aiming to increase Axa's market capitalisation to the symbolic threshold of $100 billion, from roughly $65 billion, by improving the shares' multiples.
"I am not interested in becoming big just for the sake of it," he says. "But our competitors are big and size allows you to become a price-setter rather than a price-taker. A market capitalisation of $100 billion will give us more room for manoeuvre."
Mr de Castries' goal of creating value for shareholders is epitomised by the sale of DLJ, on the grounds that it is not part of Axa's core business of "financial protection and wealth creation" - in other words, insurance and fund management.
However, Mr de Castries will find it difficult to escape his former boss's heritage. Mr Bebear, who built Axa almost from scratch, was dubbed the "godfather of finance" for his influence on French business.
To make things harder, Axa's substantial shareholdings in French and international companies put Mr de Castries, whether he likes it or not, at the centre of the country's business establishment.
Yet he is determined to avoid playing a similar role to that of Mr Bebear. For example, he refuses to sit on any board of directors outside the Axa group in order to avoid time-consuming boardroom battles.
"My job is to determine what is good for the company and when to do it," he says.
