Salut! – welcome to the France category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the Republic of France, business issues relating to the France, the French people or culture.
France in some ways feels outside Europe. It has the biggest love of Japanese culture from all European countries. It has also cut a swathe in science fiction and graphic novels. France also does things differently like doing big infrastructure better than other European countries such as high speed rail or civilian nuclear power. Skills that the UK seems to have lost somewhere around the OPEC oil crisis of 1973.
On the flipside, there are aspects of France that define Europe, such as the George V Hotel or the country’s luxury powerhouses LVMH and Hermes.
Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Renault launched a new advertising campaign. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as France.
So far, I haven’t had too much French related content here at the moment. That’s just the way things work out sometimes.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are French related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
The August 2023 newsletter was inspired by LinkedIn’s in-built newsletter function. It’s almost the bank holiday so I thought I would spend some time to try out the newsletter function in LinkedIn.
If you’re reading this, you’re a pioneer! If this goes well I will put one out each month. You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
LK99 & room temperature superconductors – why it was a big deal, what it would have meant if it were true and the damage likely to have been caused given it’s likely to be false.
Chip War by Chris Miller. You can read my full review here.
Things I have been inspired by.
How left wing politics inspired Prada’s clothing designs.
Encouraging empathy for people with dementia in Japan with the restaurant of mistaken orders (scoll to the end here to find out more).
Things I have watched.
Three Body Problem. Chinese adaption by Tencent Video and made available for FREE on their YouTube channel. Don’t worry it has English subtitles. This is based on the blockbuster novel The Three Body Problem by Chinese science fiction author du jour Cixin Liu. The three books in the series are all fantastic and there is soon to be a Netflix adaption as well.
The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video. An ambitious adaption of William Gibson’s novel of the same name. Amazon Studios recently cancelled the next season of this drama, which is a real shame as its one of the stand out series amongst the content on Prime Video.
Un Flic and Le Samourai – the magical formula of French new wave director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Alain Delon created some iconic crime films that inspired directors in Hollywood, Hong Kong and Japan.
The sales pitch.
Available for strategic engagements in the autumn. Contact me here.
The End.
Congratulations, you’re reached the end of the August 2023 newsletter. Until next month: be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
The Threat of Decivilisation | Quillette – President Macron when having a Chatham House type discussion with sociology experts used the phrase processus de décivilisation – as a descriptor for the widespread civil and political unrest that has rocked France.
Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron
On the face of it, decivilisation is an appropriate term if Macron believed that there was something rotten at the centre of French society. But the phrase decivilisation is problematic and Macron has been capitalised by French on the political left.
Renaud Camus
The crux of the left’s criticism is a work by the author Renaud Camus. Camus became famous writing a book called Tricks about a series of up to 45 stories (depending which edition you read) about one-night stands he had travelling around the world as a gay man in the late 1970s. Decades later Camus became more famous for his contributions to ideas of the far right, notably the great replacement concept in reaction to increased immigration in France from former French colonies. While these works were published in French they were summarised for English readers in his book You Will Not Replace Us!
In his works he describes the gradual takeover of France as decivilisation.
The left
The left drew a line between Camus work and Macron’s phrase and assumed that it was a way to build a bridge to the resurgent far right in France.
The reality is more complex. The degree of change in French society has driven backlashes in French society, in a similar way that Brexit and small boat immigration did in the UK. The problem for the left is that these reactionaries would have been natural constituents of the left. The left, like in many countries, instead has pivoted to degree educated urban dwellers, abandoning the workers to the far right.
Is French society really breaking down?
It’s hard to tell whether ‘decivilisation’ is really happening. Civil disturbances tend to happen during times of economic unrest and in the past has been a reset. There is a body of opinion who believe that social media has its thumb on the scales, driving things harder and faster without a countervailing force to help balance things out over time, like happened in previous decades.
Japan Rail Companies Limit Train Passes Due to Chip Shortage – these stored value cards also allow consumers to buy things in combinis as well as travel. They are similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus cards. What’s happening to the chips through? Japanese YouTubers have published advisory videos around the debacle for tourists to Japan. It seems to be a drive towards registration as much as anything else
Cigars are still a thing. This looks like a feature length video produced in conjunction between the YouTuber and a cigar manufacturer.
Marketing
Multi-factored reasons in nature why campaigns seem to be working less well. We know that as campaigns have become more digital, campaigns have been less effective and marketers being less confident in their campaigns. Interesting the way brand building on digital is danced around. The channels often dont work and measures are BS only a technologist would love.
Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price.
The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in Shenzhen, China and later in other parts of China. The best known of which was the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. Back in 2010, I was driven around the perimeter of the site, which went on for miles.
The only site that I had seen which would be comparable would be the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing site in Sindelfingen which is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area. I spent part of my childhood and early adult life living next to a General Motors car plant, a shipyard and a couple of oil refineries, so I am used to scale of industry.
As Apple came back from a near demise in the mid-1990s, it needed manufacturing scale so the combination of Apple and China happened due to that. Over time the Apple and China relationship drove manufacturing expertise and new ways of doing business, such as using CNC machines at scale. Prior to Apple and China, smartphones were plastic mainly due to product engineering influenced by Nokia’s work on its feature phones.
Over time, the Apple and China relationship evolved. Chinese developers make up about half of the programmers making iPad and iPhone applications. Chinese component manufacturers replaced US, Korean, Japanese and European suppliers. Apple and China has become tightly entwined as Chinese manufacturers look to dethrone Apple at the same time.
Apple and China national security focus
China’s state and national security focus has spilled into the economic and social aspects of policy which has a high probability of reaching the Apple and China relationship. Apple already compromises on its privacy tenet in the way it handles China’s data. It actively supported China versus Hong Kong protestors – doing everything it could to disrupt the protestors self-organising tools.
China has shown that its ever expanding security considerations trump business so Apple and China may come to a rapid and disruptive break. Apple is trying to de-risk production outside China but it might be too little, too late. Apple and China are due for a relationship reset.
China’s assessments of Soviet Union’s collapse is very interesting as they offer a playbook of Xi Jinping thought
China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths | Financial Times – “It’s hard to attract capital if you can’t get a report from a global due diligence firm,” said one international services executive. That could run counter to the government’s efforts to revive animal spirits in China’s economy, consultants and investors said. “Maybe this is the intention,” said the head of one consultancy in Beijing, “to choke off investment and get the state to step back in, to stop the ability of investors to place bets.”
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China | Foreign Affairs – less convinced this assertion is true, when we look at natalistic policies in authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu with Decree 770 which was one of the strictest anti-abortion law at the time, or Nazi Germany’s breeding programmes
US Companies in China Grow More Pessimistic of Ties: AmCham Survey – Bloomberg – Some 87% of respondents to a flash survey taken last week said they were at least slightly pessimistic about US-China ties, according to the survey published Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That was 14 percentage points higher than the chamber’s previous poll. “Bilateral relations between the United States and China have substantially deteriorated,” said Lester Ross, chair of AmCham China’s Policy Committee. “It’s hard to see at this point when they will begin to improve — and this, of course, affects the ability of business to operate across borders.”
China Ratchets Up Pressure on Foreign Companies – WSJ – Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities say a central tenet of the effort is the desire to more tightly control the narrative about China’s governance and development, and limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China… Some foreign business executives say they worry the rewriting of the espionage law means that many topics, ranging from the status of Taiwan to China’s human rights record to technology such as semiconductors, are now becoming off limits in discussions with their Chinese counterparts. The recent trouble for foreign companies in China is drawing criticism in Washington. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs a congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Thursday, “Our business leaders need to take off their golden blindfolds and recognize that the recent police raids of American companies Bain and Mintz are not one-offs, but part of a long, proud tradition of exploitation.”.. The push is driven by a deepening conviction within China’s leadership that foreign capital, while important to China’s economic rise, isn’t to be fully trusted – if I was a brand planner in China or Hong Kong I would be very wary at the moment as this will spill over into agency life (paywall)
Longitudinal consumer behaviour change around increased empathy in western markets
A lot of this focus on the expertise in the ‘aspiration economy’ sounds like brands back in the early 1990s again. The kind of expertise exemplified by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity or the characters Randall Graves and Dante Hicks in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks.
The new industrial policy, explained – by Noah Smith – the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to
Too Big to Challenge? | danah boyd | apophenia – the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech. Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of wacky, Big Tech is what is keeping the stock market’s chin above water. In the process, Big Tech is accounting for more and more of the stock market – edited for brevity
The gender pay gap is not a myth, it’s math – it’s mostly not a discrimination story, it’s a parenting story. But more flexible employment is likely to be more of a discrimination story
Microsoft-branded mice and keyboards are going away after 40 years – this reminds me of when a new exec joined Bill Gates era Microsoft in the late 1980s/1990s. The company had unintentionally had in warehouses 3 years sales worth of Microsoft mice ready to sell. Their hardware with the exception of an ergonomic keyboard haven’t been great products that were superior to other technology companies
Interesting that even state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is complaining about the poor quality of modern German cars. Back in the early 1970s BMWs had a reputation as being clever fragile rust buckets, but the decline of Mercedes is far more dramatic in terms of quality. The decline seems to be in lock step with the globalisation of these companies and an increased focus on shareholder value.
Compare and contrast with older Mercedes cars across the Middle East and Africa.
Project MUSE – China’s Hong Kong Affairs Bureaucracy: Factional Politics and Policy Consistency – “From the perspective of factional politics, this article sheds light on the functions and operations of the Central Liaison Office and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (the “two Hong Kong offices”) throughout the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), focusing on the 2013–22 period. The authors posit that the stronger the factional relationship between the top leader responsible for Hong Kong affairs and the heads of the two Hong Kong offices, the greater the policy consistency between the two offices and the central authorities on Hong Kong issues. This article uses text mining techniques to measure the degree of policy consistency between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two Hong Kong offices from 2013 to 2022. In 2020, Xi appointed his protégés as directors of the two Hong Kong offices, thus regaining absolute control over Hong Kong affairs. Xi may further tighten his hold on Hong Kong in the future, thereby undermining the region’s autonomous status.” – Interesting aside: The Party and State Institutional Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案) unveiled in March established the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Central Committee (中央港澳工作办公室) on the basis of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council. The latter has essentially become a Party body instead of a state body, and the arrangement is now “one organisation, two nameplates” (ie., two identities). – expect even further ratcheting of authoritarian measures in all aspects of Hong Kong life and economy
Culture and technology adoption’s effect on Japanese information design online. It reminds me of the early web portal designs were more like print newspapers.
Interesting that the Korean government is allowing these strikes to go ahead given the central role of Samsung in the country.
Luxury
Alibaba, Partners Fight Fraud and Root Out Counterfeits – Over 730,000 IP rights were under Alibaba protection by the end of 2022. 98% of IP takedown requests by rights holders were handled within 24 hours for the third consecutive year – I wonder what Amazon numbers look like for this?
I didn’t realise that Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise went back this far. DigiTimes has unprecedented access to the elder statesmen and experts on the early Taiwanese semiconductor industry
Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia | Reuters – Reuters put trackers in usable secondhand shoes to see where they would end up. The main gist of the story is that Dow recycling effort was a failure, which is also embarrassing for their partner the Singapore government.
The idea was the sneakers would be made into playground surfaces. Reuters seems to have stopped investigating the story of Dow recycling shoes, but I was left with more questions about Dow recycling than answers from the Reuters report:
Were some of the shoes more distressed than others?
Do Reuters know what happens to unwearable sneakers that enter the Dow recycling process?
Is it more ethical to sell on lightly used shoes as affordable footwear to Indonesians or recycle them regardless? Reuters doesn’t have an answer to this issue
UK struggles with transition to manufacturing electric cars | Financial Times – foreign carmakers’ core concern is that Britain’s reputation as a stable and pragmatic place in which to manufacture vehicles has been shattered, initially by the 2016 Brexit vote, and more recently by last year’s political turmoil at Westminster. “They are asking whether the UK is a stable partner,” said one person close to the Japanese companies. – Brixiteer economic expert Patrick Minford openly discussed the demise of the car manufacturing industry
Women and ethnic minorities overrepresented in advertising industry, finds report – Women and ethnic minorities are now overrepresented in the UK advertising industry following a decades-long push to improve diversity, according to a new survey. A 2022 census found that an estimated 55pc of employees in the sector were women, compared to 45pc who were men. That was after the number of women increased from an estimated 11,600 to 14,400, an increase of 24pc, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) said. At the same time, the proportion of non-white employees increased by almost one third to 24pc, compared to 18pc a year earlier. Women made up 51pc of the population in England and Wales in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, while non-white ethnic groups comprised about 18pc. In London, where most of the UK’s advertising industry is concentrated, non-white ethnic groups represent roughly 46pc of the population. The IPA said there was more work to do on diversity, as women still only get just over one third of executive jobs in the ad industry, while non-white individuals only occupy 11pc of roles. – Daily Telegraph on how it feels that ‘woke’ addend risks becoming ‘out of touch’ with the British public, but doesn’t manage to make its argument very well.
Walt Disney vs Ron DeSantis: who really won the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ dust-up? | Financial Times – Instead of candidates with backgrounds in economic development or tourism, he packed the board with political allies. Two of them are leading lights in the culture wars that have helped DeSantis build a national profile ahead of a presumed run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Among them is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty group and a champion of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” – Disneyland Florida is pretty screwed
The Michelin Snow Sock or to give it its proper name SOS GRIP(R) Evolution does a similar job to studded tyres or snow chains (often called RUD Chains after the German company RUD Ketten – a famous manufacturer of snow chains).
The Michelin Snow Sock looks much easier to store and fit than snow chains and is likely to be less damaging to road surfaces. This new Michelin Snow Sock seems to rely on the black bands across the face of the tyre.
A key difference is that snow chains can also be used in really muddy conditions and can be used to protect the tyres in hard surfaces such as quarries and mines – although this is usually the domain of a specialist product. You can’t doe these things with the Michelin Snow Sock.
Inspecting a car before purchase
Interesting tips on inspecting a car that you are interested in buying. Its interesting how democratised specialist tools have become.
Twitter
Professor Scott Galloway talks to Christiane Amanpour about the current economy and the rollercoaster moves at Twitter. My favourite quote from this, describing the recession as a ‘Patagonia vest’ recession affecting knowledge workers the most so far.
Junya Watanabe Menswear Fall/Winter 2022
I am about 10 months late to this, but Junya Watanabe did a menswear collaboration with Jay Kaye from Jamiroquai mirroring his mid-to-late 1990s style. Its a mix of indigenous wear that was popular from gap year students (or people who wanted that boho look), rave culture and Goa trance, sports wear and technical outdoor clothing.
Here is the mini video look book that Junya Watanable made for the menswear collection.
Here is the original video for Virtual Insanity
Behind the scenes on how the Virtual Insanity video was made. How the effect was achieved was quite surprising.
Shakatak
I didn’t realise how popular jazz fusion group Shakatak was in Japan. To me there where pre-house UK dance music. I found this Japanese festival performance by them.
The Tokyo Crossover Festival was was originally organised by the Kyoto Jazz Massive member Shuya Okino.
It was April 2002. I was invited to the Future Jazz Festival held at Zagreb, Croatia. The well select lineup for this 3-days event was Victor Davies, Jessica Lauren, Rainer Truby, Azymuth, Zero dB and many more. The huge success all owed to Eddy & Duss and their incredible local support attracted 1500 enthusiastic people each day! Frankly, and forgive my ignorance, I was quite shocked. This was Zagreb, Croatia. The media that I was exposed to depict the negative image of an on-going civil war for all what I remember. Needless to say, I was inspired and at the same time wondered why Japan never had such festivals. Sure we have money-flowing mainstream Rock Festivals and Techno Festivals but nothing such as Deep House or Future Jazz festivals – which is surprising especially when Japan holds the biggest market share for such music. What is more depressing is that the “traditional” Jazz summer festival seems to be loosing its energy every year… I waited. I thought someone would eventually do the future-jazz festival here in Japan. There were few attempts but did not leave strong impact. Waited few more years…and thought it was time for me to take some action. I called it “Tokyo Crossover Jazz Festival”! This is the first year and I am treating it as an introduction or presentation for the successful year to come. Therefore, it will not be a gigantic outside “typical” festival but the main purpose for this first festival is to cause Crossover Jazz awareness and for artists who have same music vision to gather together. Of course, I am aiming for the fan-pleasing exciting showcases. We have a good “crossover” jazz scene in Japan and I want the fans, all over the world, to know. In the future, the festival will feature artists from Jazz, Techno, Hip- Hop, House and the music will cross all over – the ideal festival that I keep visioning and working hard for! At the end though, all I want for everyone and myself is to…have a good time!
Shuya Okino (Kyoto Jazz Massive)
Internet explained in five levels of difficulty
I showed this to my Dad and he loved it. So I thought I would share it here too.
