Orange stressed

When I was searching for my first job, I always told this joke to my friends: people are suiciding in Orange to get out of it, and I am dying to get into it. Orange is the historical telco (France Telecom) in France who suffered in last years from a high number of suicides among its employees. Well it’s true, I never understood the deal till the day, in a bookstore, my eyes were caught by a black book with the Orange logo on it, and entitled: Orange Stressed.

The author of this book, Ivan du Roy, is a journalist in the weekly Témoignage chrétien and collaborator in the online magazine Basta!. In this book, Ivan du Roy gives us a historical glimpse of Orange and explains why we have suicides today in this great company. The chapters are highly backed with facts, especially from the Stress Observatory of France Telecom.

The story begins in the 1970s where France was way behind its neighbors in terms of telecommunications. To end this situation, the government of Gescard d'Estaing launched the Delta LP plan: Thousands of enthusiastic technicians were recruited by the PTT administration (Post, Telegraphs and Telecommunications) back then to modernize the network infrastructure of France.

In 1990 the transformation of the PTT into an international corporate began. The PTT was divided into two public companies, La Poste and France Telecom. In 1996, France Telecom was privatized into a corporation. One year later, 21% of its capital was sold, and its action was quoted in the stock market. Since that year, and till the day, this percentage kept on increasing. So why was France Telecom privatized?

Many factors enforced this direction. First, there was the Milton Friedman's neoliberalism influence with Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK: in these countries, telcos were already privatized. Second, the European Commission, in order to Europeanize the telecom services in Europe, chose the deregulation of this sector. A green book was published on this subject. This decision was highly influenced by some European industrial lobbies (e.g. European Round Table of Industrialists), and a big think-tanker and business man played a key role in this influence: the Belgian Etienne Davignon. Finally, and ironically, it was the left wing in France with Michel Rocard that opened the Pandora box by transforming the PTT administration into a public company. It was their reaction to face the difficult economical situation at the moment. To pass their solution, they had an undeclared agreement with the second most powerful syndicate CFDT behind CGT who knew about it too late. The left wing and the CFDT paid the price of their decisions each one in its upcoming elections. For Ivan du Roy, this direction was a pure political choice, because the announced needs for privatization (modernization and unification of networks, technological revolution, cheaper services...) were already satisfied with the PTT administration.

In 1998, The European telecommunications industry was deregulated for competition. New competitors entered the French markets (e.g. SFR & Bouygues). The strategic response of France Telecom to this deregulation was the expansion in international markets, to catch up the market shares it has lost in France. The CEO of France Telecom Michel Bon led this strategy by a big number of fusions, acquisitions, OPA operations in Europe and in Africa (especially the purchase the UK mobile operator Orange which became the official trademark of France Telecom). Huge sums of money were also paid to buy UMTS licenses in different countries. The French state was blinded by the billions of Euros income due to the sale of actions and never controlled these operations as the main shareholder. Unfortunately, in the summer of 2000, the speculative internet bubble has exploded, and all of risky operations of France Telecom caused it huge amounts of losses and France Telecom was the most indebted company in the world, with 70 billion Euros of debt.

How to get rid of 70 billion of junk bonds? France Telecom will witness the era of cost killers. The new CEO Thierry Breton comes to France Telecom with an army of well paid cost killers. They put in place the NeXT plan to reduce the number of employees by 22000 in three years. Employees were pushed in different ways to leave the company. Cost killing rhymes with work intensification, reorganizations (delocalization…) and shift in professions to ones generating more cash flow like commercial professions. These huge changes caused a cultural choc to the employees. First, these changes question their history and values, in other words they would feel that everything they did before was useless. A typical employee in France Telecom is a technician with the public service culture deeply rooted in him. In a short time, we put him in call center, without convenient training, and force him to give the minimum time to clients, which is completely against his old public service culture. This brutal change caused major psychological problems which are highly reflected on the health of the employee and his private life, leading him to suicide in extreme conditions. Changes came from the top of the hierarchy without being well understood by the employees and the management of these changes seems to have been a big failure.

The alerts are in red for France Telecom: precarity of work, ratio of absenteeism and number of suicide attempts. The direction seemed to be in denial at first. In response to the suicide attempts, the company created cells to accompany persons in difficulty, but never questioned the organization itself. It didn’t consider the roots of the problem.

France Telecom is gradually waking up from this long sleep of denial; there are more and more forces from the inside that are trying to stop the drift of the financial logics from the reality of work.

If you are interested by the subject of stress in work due to modern organization of work, I strongly recommend you to watch the two part French documentary “La mise a mort au travail”. In one of the parts a small debate is held with Stephane Richard, the current CEO of France Telecom.

Achraf

Update: For french speaking readers, there is a recent interesting documentary on the subject by France 5. It shows what have been done in France Telecom since the arrival of the new CEO Stephane Richard who promised to solve these cumulated social  problems after admitting their existance. You can watch it on YouTube:

SS2I, Inter-contrat et Open Source

Tous ceux qui ont travaillé dans une société de service connaissent bien le cauchemar de l’inter-contrat. C’est la période durant laquelle le consultant n’est pas en mission, donc n’a pas d’activité. C'est situation psychologiquement dure pour celui qui la subit car le sentiment d’inutilité met en cause l'identité professionnelle du consultant.
Il y a des SS2Is qui renvoient ceux qui sont en inter-contrat a leurs maisons en attendant une mission. C’est ce qui est le pire pour le consultant. Mais Il y en a qui sont bien plus intelligentes et essaient d’utiliser le temps inactf du consultant :
- Soit par formation, qui est une une solution logique pour les deux partis. le consultant monte en compétence pendant ce temps libre, et la société valorisera plus son salarié. Seul gros bémol: ça coûte cher pour la société
- Soit par mise sur des projets en interne, souvent sur des petits projets et sur une courte durée, mais je trouve que c’est une solution inefficace. En fait, le consultant ne voit pas vraiment la finalité de ce quil fait autre que tuer le temps perdu, donc il a toujours le sentiment d'inutilité même s'il bosse sur un projet. En plus, le temps de se mettre sur le projet va rendre son intervention encore plsu inefficace.
Dans le cas d’un consultant développeur, j’ai pensé à un compromis entre les deux: inciter le consultant à participer à un projet open source durant sa période d’inter-contrat. En participant à un projet open source, le consultant apprend beaucoup, même il y en a qui disent que c’est la meilleur façon pour apprendre à développer. Donc on a le même avantage que la formation mais sans coût. Un autre avantage pour le consultant, c'est de travailler sur un vrai projet, qui a une finalité, et qui est comprise par le consultant.La société de service verra ses employés de en plus plus impliqués dans projets open source, car une fois qu’on commence, on aura tendance à continuer même si c’est sur le temps personel. La société peut communiquer à l’extérieur sur son implication open source. Les enjeux de ce genre d’initiatives sont les suivants: Comment convaincre le consultant a le faire? Comment procéder pour choisir un projet open source pour le consultant? Comment évaluer le travail du consultant?

Achraf

Rework, a new business book

 Lately I heard a little buzz going on about a new business book, Rework, written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson. They are the founders of 37signals, which is a collaborative software company with a few millions of customers out there in the world. I started to read it in the train, between Lannion and Paris, but its great typical-informal-american style of writing, its clear and strong ideas, and its attractive design forced me to keep my eyes on it until I finished it on the road. I will outline some ideas of the book in five themes: Scrum practices, ethical business, good & bad  habits, strictly simple products and culture.

 Through the pages of the book, I noticed that the writers praise alot the agile software development methodology Scrum, without naming it. They insist on the importance of having short term small objectives, and dividing those objectives into small tasks. This way we can build the product by making small "wins", which motivate the employees. Fast meetings are encouraged, and big abstract documents (specs, bla bla..) are highly considered inefficient.

 The second important theme of the book's ideas is the ethical business. According to Rework, the most successful products in the world are those whose creator wanted to solve his own problem (a REAL problem), a product he would use himself, a product that makes difference! Don't copy your competitors, forget them and focus on yourself. Forget all of the traditional marketing techniques, just focus on you product, let it talk for you, let your satisfied customers outgrow you! Stop worrying about growing, this should not be an objective! and specially forget about banks and out-money, try to avoid them to the maximum, because sooner or later they will confiscate the control over your business, and the focus on it, so your business will end up by being ruled by unethical financial logics. Finally, you have to be honest with your clients about your products, about on what can be done and what cant be done, just be your self!

 The third theme is about some good and bad habits at work. Bad habits: Meetings! avoid meetings to the maximum because they are a waste of time; Workaholism! reject working overnights, because it doesnt mean more productivty, but means burnouts; Planning! planning is guessing, so stop planning and start acting. Good Habits: Alone Time! give your self everyday some alone time to avoid interruptions and be more productive; Inspiration Time! start working directly whenever you are inspired, because inspiration doesn't come all the time.

 The fourth theme is about making your product and your company the simplest possible. Simple means less expenditure, clearer, more focus on the core business, on the most important. Simple means less mass, less inertia, more flexibility. This is why the authors advice the readers about working under some prefixed constraints to limit business drifts and avoid complexity.

 The final theme is about the culture of the company. Culture is not some few bla-bla nice words on the walls of the company, its not something that it is decided just after a managers' reunion. Culture is the result of the cumulative behavior of the company through the years. Culture is the sum of all of the decisions of the directors. If we are honest with our clients, our employees will have this attitude, if we are considerate to the environnement, our emplyees will be also. The intersting part of this, is that when you have a company with a strong culture, you never loose your time in taking decisions, because decisions are obvious. A Fair trade label distributor will never take more than 3 seconds to decide whether it should sell a Coka Cola product.

 There are many interesting ideas on other themes, like hiring, identifying by products... but I will not reveal anymore of this book, I strongly recommend you to have a look on it, and as the book cover says: "Ignore this book at your own peril".


Achraf

Ethical Shopping application for Android

To begin the year with ethical concerns, I developed an application for android that helps the consumer to choose the most ethical products while shopping.

The idea of the application is simple: whenever you decide to buy a product, in the mall for example, you use my application eShopper (e for ethical!) to scan the bar code of the product, and automatically the application will give you a score on a scale of 14 of the ethical behavior of the producing company. The score is fetched from the site http://www.corporatecritic.org and it is based on the behavior of the target corporate in the following domains:

   -Environment (Climate Change, Pollution & Toxics, Habitats & Resources..)

   -People (Human Rights, Workers' Rights, Irresponsible Marketing..)

   -Sustainability (Organic Product, Fairtrade product..)

   -Political activities 

   -Animals
 Here's some screen shots of the application:

There is a nice application in the market that offers a similar functionality: barcoo. barcoo is based on Rank a Brand, which obviously is website for ranking a brand, but based on the input of users and till now its database isn't big enough (cant find France Telecom for example!). This is why I prefered using the corporatecritic website, because their database is bigger and based on publications, communications, news...

Installation and usage

To install my app, you first have to install Bar code scanner app, because I use its library for scanning bar codes. Download eShopper from here and install it on your phone. To use it, just scan a product bar code, and wait for the results (you must have an internet connection of course!). When the results appear, verify that the found company in the title is the same one figuring in the bottom text.

Geeks Section:

eShopper uses Zxing library for scanning bar codes. I only limited bar codes to one line EAN codes found on most products. Once we have the results of the scan, I send the EAN code to GS1 website and parse the HTML response to get the name of the company that manifactured the product. Lets suppose I got "France Telecom Reseaux", then I send this string to corporatecritic and parse the response HTML to get the score. If I dont get the score at the first time, I retry with "France Telecom" and so on.. ( if  the app doesnt find "France Telecom", it will searches for "France" and will find unrelevant results, this is why the user has to verify that the found company in the bar code (title) corresponds to the company searched for (bottom text)).

I hope that you find the application useful, and I wish you a very ethical 2011! and don't hesitate to leave a feedback on the application in the comments.

Note well that the application will not be maintenained, it has been developped very fast (so might have some remaining bugs) and doesnt have any commercial purposes (otherwise it would be a freaky unethical ethical app  no?)

Achraf Souk

Smart business usage of tablets in restaurants

In a couple of weeks, the HUMANITY will celebrate the release of the first tablet computer: the iPad. Since that date I haven't really found that killer use case of the tablet that will drive me to buy it as a consumer. Till now, what I cant do on my PC, i can do on my smartphone and vice-versa.

Reading eBooks and magazines on the tablet is a very interesting concept, from an ergonomic point of view (many books in one place, easy navigation, interaction..) , from business point of view (better reachability, DRM, CRM..) and from an environmental point of view (less paper). But this concept has a dedicated and optimized tablet (kindle) that was commercialized years before by Amazon.

Nevertheless, I found a great potential for tablets in restaurant business. This summer, I read an article about an Italian restaurant in Lille (France) that started using the iPad for his menus. In fact, when the server comes to take your order, he hands you an iPad, from which you can directly order according to your choice:

The iPad suits perfectly to this job, because it has the same size of a traditional menu, and offers enormous possibilities of interaction, and thus enriching the client experience. For example, the client would like to know more about a certain plate, what is it made of, what it would look like, maybe recommendations of other clients..Servers should not feel threated, because the tablet will not substitute to them, it is complementary to their jobs.

Today I read about a big restaurant in Chicago that is using the iPad for its wine menu. Truth to be said, it is a wonderful application, that helps the client a lot in its buying decision. From a marketing point of view, the use of iPad in this context is very coherent with the luxury character of the consumed drink. The Chicago restaurant owners explain that introducing the iPad for ordering wine has increased by 20% their bottom-line:

Using tablets also can facilitates payment (by credit card number, paypal..), ordering process (the order is sent instantaneously to the servers screen)...

Bref, A really innovative idea for business!

Achraf