Crises are not accidents in a manager’s life, but a normal part of the work. It’s important to detect the early signals, to know how to anticipate it, or even provoke it to take control. Often unannounced, the crisis always has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Strategies allow to speed up its development and move on. Several reactions can worsen the crisis, instead of lessening it. Others help benefit from it.
Jean-François Lisée was born in Thetford Mines, son of an entrepreneur father (from whom he gets his great respect for entrepreneurs) and a feminist mother (from whom he gets his great respect for feminists). He has been a journalist, activist student, and young local correspondent for the daily Le jour. He also swept asbestos dust in the mine, worked as a cashier, boss of the returnable bottles, mobile home cleaner, hotel receptionist.
He studied law in UQAM, at the end of the 1970s. We could hear his young voice at night during the weekend reading the news on CKAC.
Choosing journalism over law, he left Montréal in 1981 to study in Paris, at the Centre de Formation des Journalistes. For three years, he was freelancing for Québec and French magazines, and succeeded in selling some articles to Le monde, Libération and L’Express, during Mitterand's first years in office.
At the end of the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's second mandate and the end of the Cold War, he was the Washington correspondent for La Presse, L’actualité and the French weekly L’Événement du jeudi. He signed a few opinion pieces in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
In 1990, he publishes Dans l’œil de l’aigle, on the attitude of the Americans on Québec's sovereignty movement, a book which won the Governor General's Prize. It was a great year: he also won Québec's Jules-Fournier Award for journalism. In total, he published 16 books, mainly on Québec's politics and history, but also touching other aspects like social, economic, identity and international political issues.
The day after the election of the Parti Québécois in September 1994, he became political advisor for Jacques Parizeau. He's part of the team that prepared and implemented the October 1995 referendum strategy. When Lucien Bouchard replaced Mr. Parizeau, he became his political advisor until September 1999, mainly active in the major economic summits of 1996.
After a stay as a guest scholar in Paris, he founded CERIUM (International Studies Centre at the University of Montréal) at the end of 2003, where he remained Executive Director for eight years. He hosted the weekly show Planète Terre, on major international issues and organized summer schools on China, the United States, the environment, Africa, and other hot topics.
On September 4, 2012, Rosemont's constituents elect him as a Parti Québécois member of the National Assembly. He held the position of Minister of the "Relations internationales, de la Francophonie, du Commerce extérieur, de la Métropole et chargé des Relations avec les Anglo-Québécois
He became the leader of the Parti Québécois on October 7, 2016, until the general elections held on October 1, 2018.
He now has his own business, "La boîte à Lisée", producing podcasts on the history and current affairs in Québec, started to write again and has again taken up his speaker's staff.
Above all, he is the father of 5 children.