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3 ) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Top or bottom? [Un casse-tête. Pourquoi l'indication imprimée sur une pièce auto ne sert-elle à rien ?]
http://www.cartalk.com

One of the guys at our shop was replacing a head gasket [joint de culasse] on some car. Head gaskets are thin gaskets. They are made out of some kind of material usually known as gasket material. And the gasket goes between the cylinder head [culasese] and the block [bloc-moteur]. It's a flat piece of asbestos and other strange compounds. They have to be installed with the face up, but it is easy to install them incorrectly. This is why they print the word "TOP" on the top face. I walked by and said, "Boy, that's a useless piece of information isn't it?" Why is it useless?

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France's president has wasted ten years, devoted mainly to a search for scapegoats

UNDER France's fifth republic, prime ministers have come to serve a useful purpose for presidents: when the going gets tough, they get both the blame and the boot. Georges Pompidou got rid of Jacques Chaban-Delmas; François Mitterrand kicked out Pierre Mauroy, Michel Rocard and Edith Cresson. Sure enough, after the crushing French rejection of the European Union constitution in a referendum on May 29th, President Jacques Chirac turfed out Jean-Pierre Raffarin and appointed Dominique de Villepin, one-time foreign minister and unelected former diplomat, promising a “new impetus” from his government (see article). Having heard France's message, he said in a television broadcast, “I intend to respond.” The trouble is that the selection of an elite technocrat is not a meaningful response to that message. For the ultimate responsibility for the political upset this week belongs not to the hapless Mr Raffarin, but to Mr Chirac himself.

The French had many reasons to reject the constitution, but underlying their defiance was a simple point: times are hard, jobs are scarce, nothing changes, promises go unkept, we are fed up, and you—the political class—refuse to listen. After ten years as president, Mr Chirac has received this message more than once. He received it in 1997, when he called an early parliamentary election and lost, landing himself with a Socialist government. He received it in 2002, when the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the presidential run-off. He received it in 2004, when the left swept the board at regional and European elections. Now, he has received it once again.

Leaders can respond to such discontent in two ways. One is to pretend that the French social model is still valid, that no trade-off exists between social protection and economic growth, that France can close the shutters and shelter from global capitalism, that all the blame belongs with outside forces—whether globalisation, America or Brussels. The other is to admit that France cannot isolate itself from the world economy, to explain that new markets are an opportunity for French companies, that job losses in manufacturing can be balanced by job creation in services and that inflexible social protection deters the creation of new jobs.

At almost every turn, Mr Chirac has chosen the first response. His one bold attempt at economic reform, under Alain Juppé in 1995, ended in failure when he backed down after the country was paralysed by strikes. Since then, rather than confronting the populist arguments of the anti-globalisation lobby, Mr Chirac has drifted to the left with public opinion. During the referendum campaign, he was at it again, promising that the constitution would entrench the French social model and protect it from “Anglo-Saxon liberalism”. His choice of Mr de Villepin, the aristocratic product of elite technocratic training and the embodiment of everything the French have just rejected, runs true to form. Mr Chirac was first elected president in 1995, pledging that “jobs will be my preoccupation at all times”. Since then, unemployment has barely moved: from 11.3% then to 10.2% today.

At this time of morosité, it is easy to forget that France has so much going for it. Government policy may stop its top companies from creating many jobs, but they know how to make and sell the world such products as lipstick, rubber tyres, cars, handbags and insurance. There is no reason why the country should not halve its unemployment rate by deregulating the labour market—if the political will existed to take on the unions. Yet Mr de Villepin, who has never held an economic portfolio and recently called for a more socially minded programme, is unlikely to be any bolder than his predecessors.

You have delighted us long enough

The source of France's troubles is not Europe, nor global capitalism, nor rebellious socialists, nor the far-right, nor the far-left. It is Mr Chirac. His failure to be straight with the French about the need for reform has come back to haunt him. That is why a better response would have been for Mr Chirac to follow the example set by Charles de Gaulle after he lost a referendum in 1969: to accept his responsibility and resign.

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8) Reuters: BT answer prayers of distracted UK congregation [Une église galloise installe le wi-fi.]
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050531/80/fk65q.html
BT answers prayers of distracted UK congregation

LONDON (Reuters) - British telecoms operator BT Group Plc has wired up a church in Wales to allow the congregation to hook onto local high-speed Internet connections when they want a break from the sermon. Britain's largest fixed-line telecoms operator said on Tuesday it had installed a Wi-Fi wireless network access point, known as a hotspot, in Reverend Keith Kimber's St John's Rectory church in the city of Cardiff.

"The church has to move with the times and I wanted to make St John's a sanctuary for everyone, including business people with laptops and mobiles," Kimber said in a statement issued by BT. "I have no problem with people quietly sending an email or surfing the Internet in church, as long as they respect the church."

Wi-Fi -- a medium-range wireless network that is often rolled out in coffee shops and airport lounges -- allows users of laptop computers and other gadgets to access fast Internet connections without having to struggle with wires and mismatched phone plugs.

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BOB GARFIELD: Foreign language films like Talk to Her and Y Tu Mama Tambien showed up on several Best Movies of 2002 lists, but critical acclaim does not mean that foreign imports are pulling in the big American bucks. There was a time when it did. Back in the mid-70s one study found that foreign films took in more than 10 percent of U.S. movie receipts. By the late 1990s the foreign share of the American box office had fallen to a pitiful .5 percent. Film industry folks blame the decline on a number of factors, but there are hints that Americans may be taking notice of imports once again. OTM's Paul Ingles reports.

MAN IN THEATER LINE: Cine Mexicano, one adult, one senior.

TICKET MAN: Fourteen dollars.

PAUL INGLES: It's a drizzly early afternoon at the Madstone Theaters in San Diego, and filmgoers are lining up for screenings that include American independent fare like My Big, Fat Greek Wedding, Japanese animation, and a Spanish language film called De La Calle -- that's the one Alex Vega's here to see.

ALEX VEGA: I like, I like foreign films. Well, it's something different, you know, as opposed to the same Hollywood stuff. Same old thing. [AUDIO FROM AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD UNDER HERE] I like, you know, different stories from different parts of the world. [SOUND CLIP FROM AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD]

CAROL SKINNER: Stuff like the-- Werner Herzog -- Aguirre, The Wrath of God. [SCARY "WRATH OF GOD" SPEECH IN GERMAN LANGUAGE FROM AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD UP BRIEFLY] I mean I still remember feeling like I had been, you know, tied to my chair and had to remind myself to breathe, watching that movie -- it was -- had so much impact.

PAUL INGLES: That's Carol Skinner who remembers the hip foreign film scene of the late '60s and early '70s -- her first exposure to masters like Herzog, Fellini, Truffaut and Bergman. Back then you'd see a challenging foreign film in a college class or at the local art house theater, then head off to a favorite watering hole to rap about it -- for hours. In the early '80s, Skinner packed her passion for foreign films and moved from Seattle to Idaho.

CAROL SKINNER: When I first moved to, moved to Boise, the only thing you could see at the movie theater was The Raiders of the Lost Ark. I used to tease people and say, you know the reason that people in Boise don't like foreign films is cause their lips get tired. And [LAUGHS] --so I didn't have a very high opinion of people that weren't willing to go to foreign films and read subtitles, cause it really isn't hard.

PAUL INGLES: On a blind date, Carol met a movie-loving architect who just happened to have blueprints for an art house theater in the trunk of his car. The two married and opened up Flicks Theatre and are still in business after 18 sometimes tough years. According to film industry others of their generation are driving a new surge of interest in foreign films.

TOM GRUENBERG: The Baby Boomers are now at a point where they've become empt--empty nesters.

PAUL INGLES: Tom Gruenberg is co-CEO of Madstone Films, the owners of the San Diego cineplex and more screens in six other states.

TOM GRUENBERG: Their children are now 16 or 17 and they're on their own and for the first time in 12 years or 15 years-- the parents have an opportunity to go out to the movies, and they don't want to see the Batmans and they don't want to see the Spider Mans, so they want to see films that kind of draw their interest, and those are either independent films or foreign films.

PAUL INGLES: Gruenberg says this Boomer return to theaters is beginning to reverse the slide in interest and availability of foreign films on U.S. screens that started in the mid to late 1970s. That's when the American blockbuster film arrived in full force. Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters. And in place of foreign directors, young American filmmakers like Scorsese, Cassavetes and Coppola started making the kinds of edgy, thought-provoking films that used to only come from overseas. [SOUND CLIP FROM FILM SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE]

JAMES SPADER: Well, I promised each of the subjects that no one would see the videotapes except for me.

ANDIE McDOWELL: What are the interviews about?

JAMES SPADER: The interviews are about sex.

PAUL INGLES: In 1989, Sex, Lies and Videotape was screened by then 26 year old American Steve Soderbergh at the Sundance Film Festival. Critical raves and backing from Miramax Films helped Sex, Lies and Videotape gross over 20 times the 1.2 million it cost to make. It was a landmark, as studios started promoting American independent features more aggressively. Theaters, then, given a choice between a small American film with an ad budget and a foreign title without, more often went American. Emily Russo co-president of distributor Zeitgeist Films says the foreign filmmakers couldn't adapt.

EMILY RUSSO: The foreign sales agents and producers of those films had certain kinds of expectations about what foreign films could do in the United States based on perhaps, you know, the history of what they had been doing in, in the '70s and, and early '80s, and-- the price tags on those films, so to speak, were, were rather high and not realistic for what the market could bear, so I think a lot of distributors sort of shied away from, from being able to acquire those films.

PAUL INGLES: Meanwhile, on the theater end, the '80s and '90s were tough on the art houses and smaller cineplexes, and some shut down -- particularly after the mainstream theater chains started a building boom. The new megaplexes were bigger and shinier. Their stadium seats, picture and sound all superior to the funky old movie houses where foreign films played. Jeff Anderson, film critic of the San Francisco Examiner.

JEFF ANDERSON: I think the i--the original idea behind multiplexes -- if you have a thing -- a, a big giant movie theater with 16, 25 screens on it, they could play, you know, 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 foreign films and a then a bunch of other Hollywood films. But what they did instead was they have Harry Potter playing on, you know, 9, 10 screens and then, you know, other Hollywood films filling up the rest of the thing. So-- that failed. [LAUGHS]

PAUL INGLES: Despite being ignored by most big theater chains and drowned out by American media buzz over its own independent filmmakers, foreign film retained a pulse in the U.S. A few foreign releases even managed to break through to larger audiences -- Like Water for Chocolate in 1992; Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful in 1997, and in 2000, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. [SOUND CLIP FROM CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON]

PAUL INGLES: In the case of Crouching Tiger, many were drawn into the theater by word of the stunning martial arts sequences, but once in, those who were new to foreign films learned that reading subtitles wasn't so bad.

CAROL SKINNER: I mean subtitles have actually gotten better and better over the years.

PAUL INGLES: Carol Skinner of Boise's Flicks Theaters.

CAROL SKINNER: You know, when I first started watching foreign films, people would talk for 5 minutes and, and you know the subtitle would say something like "Yes, I think so too," and you, you'd know that you missed something. [SOUND CLIP FROM MOSTLY MARTHA]

PAUL INGLES: Although subtitles load the bottom third of the screen in this scene from 2002's Mostly Martha, you don't need them to know the lead character, a high-strung German restaurant chef is, well, upset with her customers. [CLATTER FROM DISHES BREAKING] The film reached a broader audience thanks to creative promotion by its distributor, Paramount Classics. Its co-president David Dinerstein says a key factor was getting the food press to write about Mostly Martha.

DAVID DINERSTEIN: We were able to, to start to screen the film for people that didn't necessarily like foreign films but loved food. [LAUGHS] And once we got the film in front of them, they became huge, huge fans and the word of mouth started to, to set in.

PAUL INGLES: Paramount's Classics Division is just over 4 years old, and in recent years every Hollywood studio that didn't already have an in-house specialty division created one to promote independents and a few foreign titles each year. With the major studios more involved, specialty theater chains like Landmark and Madstone or local entrepreneurs are buying up some of those smaller movieplexes that had closed down in the '90s.

ALBUQUERQUE MOVIE PATRON #1: Two for-- Two for Frida and whatever your largest, biggest diet coke is--

ALBUQUERQUE MOVIE PATRON #2: Could I just get a small cappuccino?

PAUL INGLES: This 8-screen theater in Albuquerque was shut for years before Madstone bought it and re-opened it.

MOVIE CLERK: If you'll just wait over there by the coffee bar, your drink'll be right out.

PAUL INGLES: Now it has a coffee bar, a lounge where patrons can talk about their movies. And on this day it's showing two foreign language films. Albuquerque is like lots of other communities across the country that have also started holding annual film festivals which include foreign movies. And the real fans know to hunt for other less-obvious screens that carry the foreign titles that still can't get into the theaters. Emily Russo's Zeitgeist Films distributes some of those.

EMILY RUSSO: Because even when there are art theaters in those smaller communities, they're playing what they'll call "art product" which is to us, you know, maybe the most commercial art films that are, are, are available -- you know films that are being distributed by the major companies, and, and therefore for the type of product that we're handling, we have to really be very creative and innovative about trying to sneak into getting-- media centers or, or museums or even to in a sense public libraries.

PAUL INGLES: Other distributors and exhibitors we spoke with all say it's their intense love for good foreign cinema that keeps them motivated to get their titles seen, since as Emily Russo says, these films are rarely big moneymakers. Still, there's always hope for a breakthrough title such as Amelie. [SOUND CLIP W/ACCORDION FROM FRENCH FILM AMELIE] The 2001 French romance proved irresistible even to foreign film skeptics, and it grossed over 30 million dollars in the U.S.; another 100 million worldwide. The possibility of returns like this and that passion for the genre among marketers and fans means that other subtitled gems are much likely to be coming to a theater near you. For On the Media, I'm Paul Ingles.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1491567,00.html
French fries protester regrets war jibe

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Wednesday May 25, 2005

Guardian
It was a culinary rebuke that echoed around the world, heightening the sense of tension between Washington and Paris in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But now the US politician who led the campaign to change the name of french fries to "freedom fries" has turned against the war.

Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war "with no justification".

Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives' office buildings ban the word french from menus, said it was meant as a "light-hearted gesture".

But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.

Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress must be told the truth."

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11) The Economist: Google à la française [Un autre point de vue sur l'affaire Googlée. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 1.]
The French language: Google à la française
Mar 31st 2005 | PARIS

The latest French v English battle

IN THE dimly lit cyber-café at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google's plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by.

He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French texts—and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. “I do not believe”, wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, “that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google's success.”

This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google's chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse, has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement.

Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the “risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world.” “I have nothing in particular against Google,” he told L'Express, a magazine. “I simply note that this commercial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king.” Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication.

The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a “committee of experts”. He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac's pet projects: a CNN à la française. Over a year ago, stung by the power of English-speaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting.

France's desire to combat English, on the web or the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France's tongue from its citizens' inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the ruling elite. The Académie Française was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spam) or bogue (bug). Laws limit the use of English on TV—“Super Nanny” and “Star Academy” are current pests—and impose translations of English slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just business as usual.

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12) The Gazette: Love notes for the 'other' special someone [Une nouvelle gamme de cartes de voeux pour son amant(e).]
http://www.gazette.net/200520/bethesda/news/275329-1.html

Love notes for that 'other' special someone
by Stephanie Siegel, Staff Writer
May 18, 2005

New line of greeting cards speaks to couples in affairs

Browse the aisles of any stationery store and you'll find cards for your spouse, children, parents, siblings and even your pet. Soon, you could also find cards for your mistress or the other man in your life, thanks to a new line of greeting cards designed especially to express the feelings intrinsic to extramarital affairs.

Bethesda resident Cathy Gallagher created the line of cards called the Secret Lover collection. Gallagher came up with the idea for the cards after she and her husband had a conversation about how many of their friends were involved in extramarital affairs. "There were all the different people that we knew that were involved in [affairs] and I thought that must be a really difficult situation to be in," she said.

As someone who buys a lot of greeting cards herself, she said the idea came to her and she thought there would be an enormous, untapped market for it. After she came up with the concept, she spent two years researching cards, statistics and creating a business plan. She looked online and went to card companies and stores. "I looked to see what kinds of cards were out there," she said. "I researched facts and figures in the media."

According to the numbers she found from a variety of sources including news reports from The Today Show, 60 Minutes, Newsweek and others, between 60 and 80 percent of men and between 40 and 65 percent of women have affairs. "Everyone knows someone or has been involved in one themselves," she said.

According to the Greeting Card Association, a trade association that represents the greeting card industry, 90 percent of U.S. households purchase at least one greeting card a year. Those households buy an average of 30 cards each year.

"I certainly haven't seen anything like this," said Lori Robinson, group show manager of The National Stationery Show, an industry trade show taking place in New York City from Sunday through today. "I think it's reflective of a trend that's going on in the industry. Cards are more specific and more focused to the audiences the cards are for. As a consumer, you don't have to come up with your own words anymore. It's done for you."

The collection includes cards that express love and intimacy, thoughts for special occasions and other sentiments, such as "sorry" and "goodbye" -- each with the distinctive voice of one engaged in a secret relationship. For example, a holiday card begins with, "As we each celebrate with our families, I will be thinking of you." Another card, meant for an office romance, says, "I used to look forward to the weekends but since we met they now seem like an eternity." "Regular relationship cards don't come close to expressing the feeling of these relationships," Gallagher said.

And while some people may disapprove of the idea of cards for people cheating on their spouses, Gallagher said her cards don't encourage or legitimize affairs. "I'm not condemning or condoning affairs," she said. "Everybody makes a choice. Whether my cards are out there or not, people are going to get in affairs."

She expects her cards to be successful because they express the intense emotions that flare up between couples in affairs without being judgmental. "People who are involved in affairs are not bad people," she said. "A lot of people meet the right person at the wrong time."

Although she said she has never personally been involved in an affair, she knows the ups and downs of them through talking with her friends who have been involved. "You don't have to be a murderer to write a murder mystery," she said. "It's irrelevant because I feel like I've experienced it through my friends." To come up with the verbiage for the cards, she said she tried to imagine all of the different situations people in affairs might be in and the words just flowed.

She collaborates with creative director Jim Grove, who designs and paints the images on the cards' covers. Grove, a partner and creative director at AetherQuest Solutions, an Arlington, Va., consulting and design firm, is the husband of Gallgher's friend of 20 years. He said that Gallagher originally asked him to design the logo and Web site for her company. After she learned about his fine art background and saw some of his work, she asked him to design the cards as well.

"I was surprised by how great an idea it was," Grove said of the Secret Lover Collection. "It is definitely a unique product and as far as a business venture, I think it's an interesting concept and idea." He said he doesn't have a problem with the cards' taboo subject matter. "It's something that's in our society," he said. "We're not promoting it or judging it."

Before leaving work to stay at home with her two children, now ages 12 and 10, Gallagher worked for 20 years in advertising. She said her background helped in creating the card line. "I know the power of pictures and words together," she said. "If the artwork catches their eye, they'll pick it up. If the card expresses their feelings, they're going to buy it."

Aside from the prospect of making money through her new business, Gallagher said she's also doing a service. "This way they have a way to express their feelings. They're in this conflicting situation. They love this other person but they may not want to break up their family," she said. "It's very taboo, but I'm not judgmental about it. I feel like I'm helping them."

Several people have expressed an interest in the cards, either because they're in affairs and would like to buy them, or as a good business idea, she said. "Business-wise, they understand that it's an untapped market."

Gallagher launched her line at the National Stationery Show this week. She hoped that retail buyers at the show would purchase the cards to sell at stationery stores, boutiques, gift shops and other places. The cards, which will cost around $4 each, are not yet available to the public, Gallagher said. May Maung, manager of Papyrus stationery store in Montgomery mall, said the idea is unique and there is a market for it, however, she said some people may find the cards objectionable. "We definitely do need a card like that because people do have affairs," she said. "But we'd have some problems when people realize what it is, they're not going to like it."

But Tania Wells, assistant manager at The Paper Store, a stationery store in Bethesda, didn't find the idea so unusual. "There is a market for it and there already are cards like that," she said. "There are happily divorced cards and there are thinking of you cards. I don't really see a need for something so blatant." When the cards are in stores, they will be discreetly labeled with words like "Love Expressions" or "Intimacy," so it won't be obvious what the cards are for, she said. "There won't be a big banner that says 'infidelity,'" she said.

As for leaving evidence of an affair by giving a lover a card, Gallagher said, people in affairs already do that. "They're still going to get gifts for their lovers, they're still going to e-mail them," she said. "Some people won't buy them because they want to be really careful, but some people will. People in affairs let their emotions take over."

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13) The Economist: Management and IT [Quelles sont les dernières modes chez les managers en manière d'informatique ?]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3849921
Management and IT: The cart pulling the horse?
Apr 7th 2005

Today's favourite management tools

EVER since the 1890s, when Frederick Winslow Taylor first wandered around the Midvale steelworks in Philadelphia with a stopwatch and a notepad, managers have searched for tools to improve the performance of their organisations. In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the use and number of such tools. Taylor's “scientific management” now sits alongside more recent inventions such as benchmarking, business process re-engineering and scenario planning.

For the past 12 years, Bain & Company, a firm of consultants, has asked companies around the world how much they use such tools, and how satisfied they are with them. Its latest analysis, out this week, shows that strategic planning, used by almost four out of every five companies, is currently the most popular (see table).

Bain's Darrell Rigby, founder of the survey, says managers are now particularly keen on anything that helps them get closer to their customers. Two-thirds say that “insufficient customer insight” is hurting their performance. Hence the steep rise in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—from seventh last time to second.

Since their excessive spending at the turn of the century, executives have focused on cutting costs. Now, says Mr Rigby, they see a limit to that process and are seeking other ways to deliver the value investors have built into their share prices.

Despite the impression that managers vacillate wildly from one trendy technique to another—mission statements one year, Six Sigma the next—most of the top slots are filled by hardy perennials. Strategic planning has been top since 1996. The current hot new tool—RFID, radio-frequency identification, a tagging system that shot to fame in 2003 when Wal-Mart demanded that its 100 biggest suppliers adopt it—is way down Bain's list, used by a mere 13% of firms, mostly American.

The biggest change in the past decade is the rise of tools that rely heavily on the use of information technology. IT-intensive techniques such as CRM, supply-chain management and knowledge management are each now used by more than half of all corporations. Executives told Bain that they are more satisfied with their supply-chain management systems than with any tool other than strategic planning.

Given that managers are looking more to IT-based techniques to improve performance, why are corporate IT departments so often seen as mere back-office fixers? In “Why Today's IT Organisation Won't Work Tomorrow”, a new study, by Dan Starta of A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, the author claims that IT departments are so focused on fixing the nuts and bolts of everyday problems that they have no time to think about wider business issues. “The best IT ideas are not coming from IT, but from the business side,” says Mr Starta.

His study's findings “shatter the notion” that IT departments are the early adopters of technology, and that general managers slow the process down. RFID is a case in point. AMR Research, a Boston-based firm, reckons that Wal-Mart's suppliers have so far invested $250m in the tags and readers required by the system. Few of them, however, have yet seen a business case for the investment beyond a desire not to lose Wal-Mart as a customer.

Doing things this way round, with the management horse pulling the IT cart, need not end in disaster. Although few of Bain's sample companies have yet adopted RFID, a significant proportion of those which have are extremely satisfied with the results, says Mr Rigby. He expects RFID to rise rapidly up the list.

Nor are managers losing faith in IT: 90% of Bain's sample said they think IT can still create significant competitive advantages for them. Corporate IT budgets are slated to rise again this year. Who will determine where that money is to be spent—the general managers or the geeks? In a book published at the end of last year (“The New CIO Leader”, Harvard Business School Press), two Gartner employees argue that CIOs must pull their socks up if they are to be fully involved in this process. They need to stop talking technobabble among themselves and start behaving like leaders. Otherwise, say the authors, CIO is condemned forever to stand for “Career is Over”.

Financing German companies: The loan factory
Apr 14th 2005 | FRANKFURT

How financial mass-production could help Germany's artisans

HANS REICH, head of Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW),Germany's national development bank, has a recurring dream: an inexhaustible well from which the country's small and medium-size enterprises, collectively known as the Mittelstand, can draw loans at reasonable rates of interest. The savings banks used to be that magic source, but new capital rules and the loss of their state guarantee from July 15th this year have made them pickier about credit risk.

German banks have plenty to lend, but processing costs and wariness of smaller credits mean that they are all chasing bigger borrowers, with sales of €50m ($65m) or more. For a loan of around €300,000, a bank's processing cost is far more than the risk premium it can earn, says Mr Reich.

His solution is a Kreditfabrik (loan factory), for processing standardised loans cheaply on behalf of many banks. The banks would deal with customers, as now; the factory would do the back-office work.

The idea is not new. The Länder, or states, and co-operative banks would claim to have the basis for their own loan factories already; the savings banks also have a project, Modell K, that they say has already cut processing costs. However, the division of German banking into private-sector, public and co-operative banks hinders industry-wide collaboration. Meanwhile, rising numbers of small firms complain that they “hardly have access any more to credit and reasonable development capital”, said Mr Reich this week.

A survey of Mittelstand companies, by Creditreform, a commercial-debt advisory group, shows that a slight upward trend in expectations last year has been thoroughly squashed: forecasts of turnover, employment and profits have fallen. Even so, these companies still intend to invest, if they can only get credit.

Mr Reich hopes that a change in KfW's refinancing programme will help. Since April 1st banks that refinance Mittelstand loans through the development bank have been allowed to charge borrowers a risk-based rather than a flat interest rate. That may encourage more lending.

However, progress on the Kreditfabrik is slow. Even if it does come to fruition, it will not solve another acute problem facing the Mittelstand: lack of equity capital. In the 1960s, shareholders' equity accounted for 30% of German companies' balance sheets; now the ratio is only 17%. And 37% of the Mittelstand companies surveyed by Creditreform this year had less than 10% capital; last year's figure was 31.4%.

Venture capital and mezzanine finance—essentially, debt with equity-like features—are still rare in Germany. That is changing slowly. Last month Deutsche Bank, the country's biggest bank, and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, a specialist industrial lender, touted “equiNotes”, a mezzanine instrument for Mittelstand companies. These would be standardised enough to trade as securities. In July the Munich stock exchange will open a new segment, called M:access, for Mittelstand companies.

Neither innovation, though, will be much use to run-of-the-mill companies. M:access demands minimum capital of €2m, a website and an annual analysts' meeting. EquiNotes are aimed at companies with sales of at least €50m and an investment-grade rating. Most of the Mittelstand will have wait to for Mr Reich's loan factory to open for business.

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15) The Economist: Relax! It's the law [Pourquoi il est parfois préférable sur un plan de rentabilité économique que l'Etat impose les vacances. VOIR AUSSI L'ARTICLE 5.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3987228
Economics focus: Relax! It's the law
May 19th 2005

Would Americans like to work as little as Europeans? What's stopping them?

MOST people greet the weekend with gratitude. But some economists view it with puzzlement. Why, they wonder, does the bulk of the population rest on the same two days each week? Why does everyone's week end at “the” weekend? From an economic point of view, it would surely be more efficient to stagger days of rest throughout the week. That way, expensive pieces of equipment would not lie idle for two days in seven, and infrastructure would be less congested the other five.

One person impressed by this logic was Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929. Workers were given every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. According to Witold Rybcynski's 1991 book about leisure, “Waiting for the Weekend”, Stalin's four days on, one day off, was unpopular, even though it was less onerous than the six-day week that preceded it. Families and friends rarely had the same day off; administrative staff rarely worked at the same time. After less than three years, the staggered working week was abandoned.

Echoes of Stalin's discovery can be found in a recent paper* by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, both of Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, of Dartmouth College. The authors begin from the premise that Stalin unwittingly proved: people complement each other at work, and perhaps at play too. Couples want to go on holiday together; parents want time off when schools are out. As a result, the economists say, people do not make solipsistic decisions about how much labour to offer in the marketplace. Their choice depends on everyone else's. Knocking off early carries less of a stigma if others do the same. Jobless youth find unemployment more tolerable if their friends are also out of work. Conversely, an ambitious underling will want to put in at least as many hours as his boss, whatever time she clocks off.

Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote think this principle might help to explain why Europeans work so much less than Americans. The gap is quite striking. According to the Luxembourg Income Study, the typical American worker puts in 1,820 hours over the course of a year. Meanwhile, according to the OECD, his German and French counterparts clock up a mere 1,480 and 1,467 hours respectively. They put in five or six fewer weeks per year, and three fewer hours per working week.

Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel prize for economics, blames these transatlantic differences on tax. Europeans would like to work more, but are deterred by the high percentage of their extra earnings the state would confiscate. Olivier Blanchard, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it down to transatlantic differences in taste. Europeans, he says, put a higher implicit price on their leisure. “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Europeans enjoy their leisure more than their American counterparts,” he writes.

But why? Some speculate that Americans, being the cultural heirs of the industrious Puritan settlers, are still gripped by a Protestant work ethic. However, as recently as 1970, Europeans worked more each year than Americans. Why should their work ethic have lapsed since then?

Rather than blaming culture or taxes, Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote instead credit trade unions. The strength of organised labour peaked in Europe in the 1970s, about the time that work hours started falling. After the first oil shock of 1973, the authors write, Germany's unions marched to the slogan “work less, work all”, and the same mantra, in different languages, was recited across the continent. In France, the unions eventually won an agreement in 1981 to cut the working week to 39 hours. The government then took up their battle, culminating in the national 35-hour week implemented in 2000. Indeed, their cause has gone continent-wide. The European Union's working-time directive, first issued in 1993 and subject to fierce debate again this month in the European Parliament, insists that workers toil no more than 48 hours each week on average (see article).

Let's all go home

There is an obvious liberal objection to any regulation of work hours: workers should be free to sell as much or as little of their labour as they wish, and employers free to buy as much as is profitable. Union demands and working-time directives are unnecessary encumbrances, stopping workers and employers striking deals to their mutual advantage.

But Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote float an alternative possibility. Such regulations might solve a co-ordination problem, they suggest. If Europeans complement each other at work and rest, they may prefer to work shorter hours and fewer weeks provided others do the same. If so, the authors write, “national policies that enforce higher levels of relaxation can, at least in theory, increase welfare.” Perhaps Americans would also like to work less, if their family, friends, or bosses worked less also. But in a competitive economy there is no way to co-ordinate their decisions. The individual American can act with others, but not too far ahead of them.

By recent evidence, however, Europe's unions got ahead of themselves. By demanding shorter working weeks with no loss of pay, they raised the cost of labour and undermined employment. In the past year or so, the French government has backed away from the 35-hour week, and German unions, most prominently at Siemens and DaimlerChrysler, have agreed to work longer for no more pay. The unions that once marched to the slogan “work less, work all”, have now conceded the need to work more, if they are to work at all.