Biography|Christophe De Vusser — The Pauli Building Where Ghent Trained Its Civil Engineers

The Faculty of Engineering and Architecture still gives Jozef Plateaustraat 22 as its central address in Ghent.

The block is the Jozef Plateaugebouw, the Institute of Sciences that city architect Adolphe Pauli raised between 1883 and 1890 on the site of the old Batavia slum. The main door faces the street that carries Plateau's name.

Christophe De Vusser came here for polytechnic training because, as later profiles put it, he was good at mathematics. He left with two master's degrees from Ghent University: civil engineering, awarded cum laude, and multilingual business communication.

The second degree is easy to skip in a consulting biography. It is the one that explains how a Flemish engineer could spend a career in rooms that run on English, French, and deal memos.

He started at Procter and Gamble in August 1996. The engineering diploma was therefore in hand by then, which is why this pin carries the year 1996 rather than a ceremony date the university has not published for him.

What he did next was not a lab or a worksite. P&G put him in global chemicals purchasing for Fabric and Home Care, split between Brussels and Geneva. Four years of buying feedstock for detergents was the first management education.

Bain would hire that combination in 2000. The firm likes engineers who can talk. This building is where the engineering half was stamped.

The facade has not been replaced by a glass atrium. Pauli's neoclassical block is still the thing a visitor photographs from the Jozef Plateaustraat pavement.

A later life spent in private-equity diligence looks less mysterious if you start from a civil-engineering faculty that taught loads, tolerances, and the difference between a drawing and a built wall.

Photo: Daniuu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons