Auvergne

"Incorruptible, blending in, tough on the job, and not talkative, they gradually invest in the factories and offices under the authority of Pierre Michelin and Pierre Boulanger. “The two Pierres,” said André Citroën, “on whom I will rebuild my temple.” The salaries of the main collaborators are authoritatively cut by thirty to thirty-five percent. Expense reports are scrutinized. Company cars are removed. Michelin, who before getting involved in the business had the Traction tested in Montlhéry, in Auvergne, and even in Sweden, knows the weaknesses of the model perfectly and knows they can be corrected quickly."

"This work of preparation for constantly different tasks can only be done in the motherland. Clermont-Ferrand is the place where “in a perpetual work of training, the common know-how” of engineers, technicians, workers, salespeople, managers is forged. In the capital of Auvergne exclusively, far from the Parisian viruses that could contaminate it. “The day the House leaves its walls, it will lose its soul,” says François Michelin. And the basic training—the famous Michelin “internship”—which targets sharp minds and strong characters more than well-filled heads, consists of addressing a concrete problem. “Engineers who enter the factory are assigned to address questions whose solutions are not found in books or speculative reflections, but in the field. They must go and find them there, and for that, know how to look, listen, spot a detail, cross-check information, ask questions that allow going further, change perspectives, and reduce the problem to a set of well-established facts upon which one can finally reason and build. And if reasoning leaves room for several solutions, it is ultimately experience that will decide.”"

"Since 1920, Michelin has started populating France with “angle markers” in reinforced cement whose four faces are covered with enamelled lava plates, a stone from Auvergne known for being indestructible. Unlike the official plates of the Administration, the names of the localities and the road numbers are visible from afar, therefore convenient for hurried motorists. The Bridges and Roads sulk."

"an English tourist arrives in the yard of the factory on Place des Carmes. A cart drawn by oxen brings his bike, whose tires have just burst. Instead of going to Torrilhon, who is known in Auvergne as the specialist in solid and hollow bands, he goes to Michelin. An extraordinary coincidence, even if the address given by a passerby was correct: the Carmes factory also used to manufacture, until very recently, solid or hollow rubber tubes for bikes."

"With thirty thousand employees — one-fifth of the population of Clermont-Ferrand — gathered over a few dozen square kilometers, Clermont-Ferrand is today, after Sochaux-Montbéliard, the largest industrial conurbation in France. A concentration comparable to those that the German giants of chemistry or metallurgy have built on the banks of the Rhine but with entirely different organizational methods and mentalities. “Michelinville,” buzzing with uncontrollable rumors, crossed by deep currents difficult to manage, has today become ungovernable. But how to successfully carry out the necessary decentralization of the capital of the empire — and at the same time, the modernization of certain workshops — knowing that Auvergne, according to Pr François Perroux, is seen as the “Michelin Region”?"