Articles

Affichage des articles du 2015

The richest 10% are responsible for 50% of global emissions. We have a duty.

Image
The poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions yet.  Full report  by Oxfam. These poor people earn money to have food, clothes, a car, a place to live. Some also spend money on some small extras and go on holidays with kids once a year. Can we ask these people to consume less, eat organic food, stop using their car, use less heating, not really? Not really. It's pretty indecent. Even if the reduce their consumption, will it change a lot the situation? Not really. The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions. Full report . It's the 10%th duty to consume less. Yes, it's our duty. We are lucky enough to be "rich" in comparison to the rest of the world. It's a duty to spend our money wisely. Why? Because we have enough money to switch to low carbon, often more costly consumption of local food, handmade products, less energy consuming houses, etc. I will

2016: I see the "Human" label coming

Image
I love labels. Handmade, low carbon footprint, carbon compensated, organic, fair trade, gluten free, vegan, etc. I see a new label in the future, "human". In a post COP21 world, trying to get less addicted to fossil fuel, "human" will mean:  - Made by humans and not by machines. - Not harmful for the planet and its inhabitants. - Not harmful for people. - Not shipped using fossil fuel. Rich people, the 10% (see below), will have to take their responsibility, consuming human products, even if they are more expensive. Indeed, we, the 10% are responsible for half of carbon emissions. If we all make an effort, we'll create another world, human friendly. We'll transfert a lot of money to companies focused on taking care of humans. The way we spend our money is a weapon. 

French Council of the Muslim Faith - le Conseil Français du Culte Musulman - must hire digital marketers

After the 13th November, I was shocked by one thing. French Muslim's voice was not in the media, in social media. Why? Islam is the 2nd biggest religion in France. We have a huge Muslim population in France. Is there a kind of censorship? Or is it a problem of communication. I did a quick research comparing social media presence of the two major religions in France, and the result is remarkably clear. We don't hear the voice of peaceful French Muslims, the 99,99% of the community because Muslim faith leaders in France did not yet built a structure to spread the word on the web and to the press, to spread the true message of the Muslim community in France. They need to hire brilliant digital marketers, and I'm sure that a lot would be happy to help the community! When you google "Catholique France Facebook", you see official properties: Eglise Catholique en France Facebook page : 52000  fans Eglise Catholique en France: Twitter page : 7000 followers (60

The only reason why people join DAECH, vote for Trump or Le Pen in France

Image
Inequity! The concentration of resources in the hands of fewer and fewer people. You wonder why people are desperate enough to risk their lives, joining Daech? Nothing to do with religion. They're just poor and desperate. The  1% richest people  own 50% of the world GDP. The  10% richest persons  own 87% of it. The 20% of richest persons own 94,5% of it. The  50% richest persons  own 99% of it. The trend is rich people are getting richer; poor the people are getting poorer. And this trend is exponential/accelerating. If you're part of the 50% poorest people who have nothing and have less every year, yes, you get extreme. Another example from an excellent source of info, CFR , in Congo: "Lack of economic opportunity boosts recruiting for armed groups, and competition for land and other natural resources often leads to violence." You wonder why people vote for far right party in France? Nothing to do with racism. People are just poor, a

Climate Change: 5 simple and macro ways to overcome it

Image
To limit climate change, there are 3 ways: People consume less: 1 - Everybody consume less. I'm not sure that the carbon emissions of a coal mine miner in China and even the emissions of a French people earning the French minimum wage are so bad for the planet, but we can all do something for the planet consuming less: Smaller cars, less travel, less meat, smaller and more expensive houses, more expensive clothes. 2 - Top consumers and companies consume less. The good old Pareto law applies there. A pool of companies is responsible for most carbon emissions and a pool of rich people responsible of most of carbon emissions. We can force rich people and rich companies to act with a classic weapon: tax! and maybe incentives (to make them renovate buildings, use sustainable energy sources, choose clean, light and less powerful cars, etc.) Fewer people consume: Yes, it's Malthusianism. Please don't think I want to kill other people. I just say people must have f

Does healthy food tsunami hit France yet?

Image
France gastronomy is listed as a UNESCO world heritage . Does it means France eat real and healthy food? Well, yes and no. Let’s check together. French are fitter...  but get bigger Obesity prevalence in France is one of the lowest of OECD . Amazing point for France. Our food heritage has a lot to do with it, for sure. Taking time to eat, always eat sit down with family, no snacking habits, love of local food, Sunday markets in every cities, we have great basis. However, about 30% of French are overweight (as a comparison, in the US it’s about 70%). But the trend is not as good: French men are 68% bigger and women are 89% bigger than 15 years ago. It definitely shows that unhealthy habits are rising, even in France. Need a proof? What’s the second most profitable country for McDonald's after US? France ! Yes, people who have a UNESCO blessed gastronomy consume processed food in fast foods and even in classic restaurants! French government created in

Thanks Facebook & the world, you rehabilitated French flag

Image
15 days ago, in Paris,130 people were shot by a criminal organization called DAESH. I don't really know why, but the world reacted immediately and at scale. France flag colours, blue white red, bleu blanc rouge were everywhere. Facebook surfed on this trend and suggested a temporary French flag was proposed. A lot of people used it. Outside and inside France. Before the 13th, November, French people did not like much their flags, except in a sports context. The French flag was associated to nationalism, fascism, our collaborationist past. Before the 13th, putting a french flag layer on your Facebook profile was quite touchy, except if you support French sports teams. Now... it's ok. I wrote 2 years ago that  Republic needs marketing . Extract: "It's not natural to like France, to believe you're part of a nation, respect and love French flag, know the national anthem. I saw a tombstone last day in Père Lachaise cemetery (famous in Patris). It was w

COP21: Who wants to be poor? Anybody?

Image
Who wants to be poor? Who wants less?  Less travel, less meat, less money, less low-cost clothes, food, furniture, less air cond, less heating, fewer kids, smaller houses, smaller fridges, smaller cars, less gas and electricity consumption, slower and more expensive transport... Nobody. Expect activists. Correct me if I'm wrong. I discussed the fact that a negative GDP is an anomaly in a previous post . Getting poorer and consuming less voluntarily are anomalies too.  They are also the best way to fight climate change.  People want a comfortable personal car, a big screen, fly all over the world (the demand for air travel will likely double by 2035), enjoy a 24h delay delivery of products, air cond during summer, heating in winter, heated "terrasses", escalators, etc. Why would they want to sacrifice themselves for nothing?  Indeed, their effort won't change anything to the climate change. Why they torture themselves, consuming less, in a w

COP 21: unfortunately, a negative GDP growth is an anomaly

Image
Which country is ok to be poorer? to have less? Less growth, less jobs creation, less GDP, less incomming tax, less citizen, less trade, less economic power, less ressources. No one. At any price. A negative GDP is an anomaly in the system. A recession, a crisis, a turmoil. Something that has to be corrected. GDP has to grow. Period. Let's look at the impact of fighting climate change, checking the quotes. Even if a lot of reports explain that not fighting climamte change will have a huge impact of GDP, taking action on it has a cost too.  I won't judge if it's a big or a small cost. I'm not qualified to. I just see that for the first time EVER. World leaders have to take decisions, not war related, that will have a negative impact on GDP. "Fighting climate change staying under a 2° temperature rise “would entail global consumption losses” of 1 percent to 4 percent in 2030. That range would rise to 2 percent to 6 percent in 2050 and the

Are you alone on purpose sometimes ?

Do you have buffers in your life? Do you have time just for you, with nothing to do? Think of it for a minute. I'm sure most of you don't have buffers, time alone and stressless. You sleep, go to work, take care of significant one and kids, meet friends, meet family, sleep again, etc. When can we create some? Lunch, going lunch alone 1h. Afterwork, pausing 1h in a cafe before going home. Morning coffee, pausing 1h before starting job. Transport, pausing when you commute. I'm starting to create these buffers and use them. It's a great pleasure and it's a bit scary. Indeed, it's like reconnecting with myself after long times meeting each others but also facing the emptiness of life when we stop the rat race.

Eat, drink and... breathe? We neglect this last one.

Have a look at physiological needs: Eating We spend so much money on eating good, eating well. Tons of content explain recipe of food, tell things about ingredients, etc. Eating is social, religious, ethological... Drinking Same as eating. Juices, wine, beer, cider, sake, whiskey, sodas. Drinking is central in every culture. Sleeping Look at the bed industry. Warmth Big topic. Leads to textile industry, heating. Sex No comment. Breathing ... Breathing what? Yes we breath and so what? Nobody cares. We totally neglect breathing. We don't consider it as something we need to care of, work on, learn, enjoy. As there is nothing to sell I guess, breathing is forgotten. Other physiological needs pitched by Maslow are the center of universe but this one is rarely discussed. Let's give breathing the same value as eating, drinking or sleeping!

The altruism path and the egoism pitfalls

Image
Altruism is trendy. People often think that taking into account other people's happiness and being happy doing that means being altruist. It's not the case. Altruism is very difficult to reach. It means being happy for others when they are happy, letting people do what they want, do not expect anything back. Here is the path.

Good food consumption: Vegetarianism and veganism is not the solution.

Image
Vegetarians, vegans, gluten free, sugar free, meat only, raw food only, etc. Ethic considerations, animal love, carbon footprint, health lead to banning some food & beverage. The issue is that at the end, you have to renounce to a lot of things. Say "Adieu" to them. Who wants this? Nobody. Who dreams of it? Nobody. Do people consider life is too short to ban so much good dishes? Most of people. How can "no" movements scale, even with a lot of marketing? No.  Only a small part of the population will accept to voluntarily renounce totally to a lot of dishes they like.  Only an official ban or a high tax can help to scale. Even if the press love the very strict trends like vegans, fruit only eater, it will never spread. So what do we do? What about fighting for "less" instead of "no": less sugar, less meat, less gluten, less coffee? We're 7 billion. Less is enough. If 7 billion people eat 25% less meat, what a step! I

People (I mean masses) will never stop doing pleasant but dangerous things except...

Image
... if it's too expensive or forbidden. People continue to drink alcohol, eat sugar, smoke tobacco even if they know it's terrible for their health.  Yes, some people change their behavior. But it's not a lot of people and it will lever be. The only way to make people change habits and consume less bad things is to make these things more expensive and tax them. Lobbies against sugar damages got this. Just google "sugar tax". And it works. See this graph of tobacco consumption in Australia: Producing a ton of beef requires so much water, consume so much resources, pollute so much, create so much diseases that the real cost of a piece of meat is far bigger than its price tag. This price of these collateral damages of beef meat should be added to their selling price too. Same for oil.

No need to deliver on time things people ignore

Image
A couple of points I learned from Lean Startup book: No need to deliver on time things people ignore. Customer insight is key. Validate their feedbacks, testing what you think they want, and then adapt your product / solution. In a nutshell: build, (and immediately) mesure, learn. Mesure innovation success measuring amount of customers using it and revenue generated. Do not build features, build customer stories. It seems like a poor sum up. But it's huge. This book is, of course, great for startup managers but it's also great for any people creating and offering stuff. I leaned amazing concepts for work and even for life.

iPhone success: it's all about paying attention to details

Each iPhone launch I read the same articles: they did not improved much things, only buy it if you have a very old iPhone, Apple's capacity to innovatie is broken since Steve left, "why I won't buy the new iPhone", Samsung innovate more that Apple, etc. And then... Huge sales success. Something unbelievable. Record breaking. Why? Because Apple pay attention to details and spending tons of resources to improve details. They are mad about details. Polishing. Fine tuning. And people just love it.  And people buy it whatever the price is. They don't buy a Phone, they thanking a brand for madly paying attention to details, and thus madly paying attention to them, which is rare.

Facebook, Mark, please hide all outdated data you have about us!

Facebook, Mark, please listen to me: Time where people were building albums is over. Time where people wanted to keep track of things is over. People care about the present. You do your best to avoid content deletion on your platform. No "delete all", no bulk deletion, no "delete it / make it invisible after 3 months" feature. People use Facebook from 12 to death. What's the point of letting a friend you ad at 31 years old check that you were married 6 years ago, fat 8 years ago, in Burma 3 years ago. It's weird, useless and counter productive in terms of usage. You have to evolve with your users. They don't want to live with a platform tracking their life for the last 10 years and making it available to 500 persons that would potentially share some stuff with, let's say, 4 friends, which means a reach of 2000 persons. They never go back to old content. I know you know, you track everything. I know you want to keep the data for your ad busine

A surprise for your customers? They'll hate that!

Why people choose... Uber? Because they feel confident. No surprise, you know the price In advance and how it works.  Audi cars? The same. No surprise, it's German quality. Zappos? The same. No surprise, you know they propose an amazing service and have fair prices. H&M? The same. No surprise, it's cheap stylish clothes. Chipotle? The same. No surprise, it's Tex Mex food made by humans with good ingredients. Qatar Airways? The same. No surprise, it's Gulf county airways have great planes and good films. Aeroflot? The same. No surprise, they are safe enough and the cheapest. Your favorite bakery? The same, you know it's good quality for price. People hate surprise, hate risks, hate uncertainty. Give them certainty, and they'll never go elsewhere.

Tipadvisor: from pretty useless rating to useful tagging and filtering

Image
What is Tripadvisor? A website where you put 3, 4, 5 stars to a place and write a little story. Tripadvisor is cool to rate overall popularity of places but it's crap for all the rest. Why? Because they miss tags, the miss filters!!! They miss structured data. They focused on unstructured data with millions of stories. Unfortunately, transforming unstructured data into structured inputs is a headache. You want the top 5 Italian restaurants in Paris? You got it in Tripadvisor and most of the time, it's good recommandations. Top restaurants deserve it. For all the rest, look... Want the top 5 Italian restaurants in the Paris's 15th district? Well, without "district" tag, no way. Want the top 5 Italian restaurants in Paris with Veggie option? Well, you can type Ctrl F to find the word veggie in comments... except that comments are cropped... never mind, ok no way. The tag "veggie" is missing. Want the top 5 Italian restaurants in Paris with a te

The world is shifting to pooling

Image
I was in NYC last week: I used UberPool I "pooled" the car with other people 80% of time. I went to clubs where people enjoy together music. I lived in AirBnB flat I "pooled" with people. I took public transport, a public ferry, free bikes, "pooling" them with other people. I visited museums opened to everybody, "pooling" it with other people. I ate in restaurants, "pooling" good food with other people. I bought vintage clothes in shops fed by people and where anybody can buy stuff. I went to a farm market where producers sell stuff they product to a pool of buyers. I prepared my trip using feedbacks of a pool of travelers and locals, TripAdvisor. I also got feedbacks and suggestions from friends. What did I do alone? Nothing. Walking maybe. Our society is erasing not pooled activities and stuff. Even private jets are no longer privates. Thanks god we still have a house with furniture, a car and a

Food industry - Are consumers finally listened?

Image
Voice of consumer is a cool concept used by marketers for a couple of years. It is seen as a great way to innovate and improve products & services the right way, based on customer feedbacks. Now look what’s happening to junk food and soda industry. The face huge difficulties. They are under pressure. Their benefit goes down. What happened? For dozens of years, junk food and soda industry was flourishing.  Everybody barely knew it was not so good for health.  These industries were spending tons of dollars in lobbying to create “positive” surveys, hire "positive doctors", influence FDA policies, make ingredient lists difficult to understand.  They were financing educational programs saying exercise is good to keep healthy. They were marketing the quality of ingredients they use. They were doing minor efforts to look more healthy. They were advertising like hell, controlling indirectly media (financed by ads) content. But now, in 2015, it seems

A bit of geopolitical stuff: how many migrants die every day?

400 people die per month trying to move illegally to Europe in 2015. 71 people were found dead in a truck in Hungary, trying to do the same thing. It's sad. Isn't it? Inequity kills. Our rich way of life kills. Recent wars created ISIS and created migrants. Making people more equal is not the only way the system can work. But if people are more equally treated, they would be a breaking news shortage in the world. Terrorism fertilizer is not religion, it's inequity and unfairness. We focus on defeating ISIS. What's the point of defeating them if the price is destroying everything, Middle East and Africa polulations including. Yes, migrants are doing illegal stuff sometimes and a mot of them are un an illégal situation. Yes they should follow the law. But they have nothing to loose as they lost all they had to come. You can't make people having nothing to loose obey laws. Instead of only spending more money building walls and hiring more policemen, we

Focus on doing things, forget the outcome

I wanted to focus on a notion I love: Focus on doing things the best way and not the result. Leo Babauta says "Grow a Plant when you’re making changes: you don’t control the outcome, so you can’t get fixated on it" Josh Bernoff says "We tell each other stories about the smart choices we make, but the stories are like constellations in the sky, connecting dots that have no real connections." Seth Godin says "Be remarkable Be generous Create art Make judgment calls Connect people and ideas . . . and we have no choice but to reward you." Why? Because it's relaxing! Because if you take 30 minutes to check how you got your job, how you met your best friends, how you met your husband or spouse, how you found your flat, how you decided to move where you live now. You'll discover one thing: it was by chance. Of course you did your best to get what you wanted but at the end, chance brought you what you have. Because it's very funny

Give a chance to your actual present, the key to eliminate frustration and bitterness?

Image
Most of personal development books say we need to be focus on the present to be happy and successful. Most buddhist books say the the same thing ( for more about the links between personal development and buddhism ...) I've discovered another meaning to this expression very recently (home made discovery, I just found it while writing my personal diary :p). I wanted to share it with you. The 2 common meanings of "live the present": 1 - Live the present usually means don't worry for the future, for a future that will not happen because things rarely happen the way we think they will happen! 2 - Live the present usually means don't regret! Don't regret a past situation, mistakes you made, choices you made. And the third one: Live the present means you don't compare your present with virtual presents you build. Explanation:  When you're proposed a job abroad very well paid. You build a virtual present of you, working abroad and ri