Paul from Paris

A 23-year old student was found dead Sunday in a lake in Saulxures-sur-Moselotte, in the Vosges mountains.

The gendarmes recovered the young man's body after a search that mobilized men and a helicopter. The coroner is conducting an autopsy to determine the precise circumstances of death.

But the general outlines are already known: the deceased was one of about a hundred students who took part in the Nancy dental school's integration weekend.

What's an integration weekend? It's a semi-official, school-sanctioned, student-run effort to incorporate entering students. It can be a lot of fun.

It can also involve binge drinking. I suspect that heavy drinking played a big part in this death, because the deceased was not himself a dental student, which suggests that he sought out the event.

Integration weekends can also involve hazing. In France, hazing traditionally involved the entire incoming class of professional schools –medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering– and military academies. After a 1998 law outlawed hazing, initiation practices were reformed and became integration weekends. Of course, abuses still occur. Hazing doesn't seem to be an issue ere, because the deceased was not a dental student.

This having been said, binge drinking and hazing deserve to mentioned together because in both cases authorities –schools, law enforcement and the courts, parents and student leaders– have turned a blind eye to them. Deaths are ruled accidental, living victims are deemed to have gone through something totally exceptional and rarely speak up.

Seen on the streets of Paris: the likeness of French president Sarkozy, depicted in the style Sheperd Fairey used for the Obama campaign. It’s Sarkobama, and it’s back.

The setting is a curbside sign instructing masters to pick up after their dogs.

At the bottom of the sign, a sticker. It shows Sarkozy’s likeness, and its caption reads “yes we lie”, in English.

We can safely assume that the sticker’s author is not a Sarkozy fan.

According to the World Health Organization, France suffers from a suicide rate higher than its neighbors: 17.6 suicides per 100 000 inhabitants. French men are more likely to take their own life (26.4 per 100 000) than French women (9.2 per 100 000). These are sad and sobering figures, and the fact that France outpaces its neighbors suggests that suicide prevention should be (even more of) a public health priority in France.

France Telecom, privatized in 1998, has more than 100 000 employees in France. In 2000, 28 of its employees committed suicide. Since the beginning of 2008, 23 France Telecom employees committed suicide, and another 13 attempted suicide.

One could reason that, although each individual suicide is tragic, the overall suicide rate among France Telecom personnel is not unusual. But no one is taking that position in France.

French media and conventional wisdom instead point to a suicide wave at France Telecom. After its privatization, France Telecom changed from a state-owned bureaucracy to a profit-oriented business. Its underlying businesses also changed dramatically, as the ascendancy of mobile communications and Internet access demonstrates.

French labor minister Xavier Darcos called in France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard for a serious discussion. Afterwards, they held a press conference announced measures that France Telecom would take.

Without minimizing the gravity of suicide or trying to find fault with France Telecom’s response, an opportunity to communicate has been misspent:

• France Telecom “decided to immediately put in place a
  freephone number to promote dialogue. Psychologists from outside the
  company will be available to listen to and talk with any employees who
  may be having difficulties”. This might be an obvious initiative for a phone company, but it seems to me impersonal (a phone chat with someone “from outside the company”, not a personal meeting or a course of therapy) and guilt-inducing (because the focus is on “difficulties” that employees “may be having”).
  
• The overall approach is bureaucratic, institutional, collective. For example, employee representatives will appoint an external consultancy to conduct an audit of the situation within France Telecom.
• At the press conference, Lombard said that he wanted to put “a halt to this suicide trend [or fashion] which, obviously, shocks everyone”. (In French: point d’arrêt à cette mode de suicide qui, évidemment, choque tout le monde).
• I’m troubled, because these remarks could be heard as suggesting greater concern with “everyone’s shock” than with suicidal employees.
  
• Many were shocked by Lombard’s description of a suicide trend or fashion (the French word Lombard used is “mode“). In official communications, France Telecom talks about “recent events” and a “series of suicides”. Lombard later said (in French), “By mistake, I used the word ‘mode’, which was the translation of the word ‘mood’ in English.” Really?

I wonder whether people haven’t misunderstood the organizational behaviors involved. Conventional wisdom has it that employees have been put under greater stress since privatization. What I’d suggest is quite different: the world and France Telecom’s business have change, but France Telecom’s management style hasn’t. All of the above suggest to me a top-down, hierarchical, bureaucratic organization, much as you’d expect from a public utility in a highly regulated business, but at odds with our increasingly “flat”, horizontal, democratic society.

Catherine Kokoszka was scheduled to begin a meeting at 10:00 am. Kokoszka, age 52, is the Paris director of judicial youth protection (in French, Protection judiciaire de la jeunesse, responsible for endangered minors, juvenile delinquents, and some troubled young adults); on October 1, she'll be awarded the Order of Merit.

Kokoszka didn't want to go through with the 10:00 am meeting last Tuesday. So she didn't. She instead jumped out the fourth-floor conference room window. (She survived the fall, and her life is not in danger today.)

We tend to ask too much of meetings but accomplish too little with them. Why not frame them by written documents: specific agendas and prompt summaries? Why not announce news in a memo, then hold the meeting to discuss implementation (but not to debate the news)?

Marketing guru Seth Godin offered some great ideas to get more out of meetings. My favorite: remove the chairs from the conference room.

Fraudulent transactions have cost Air France Flying Blue frequent flyer miles. An Air France memo from last summer reportedly points to 63 million miles used fraudulently. Investigators from the French Brigade to combat clever crime (the BRDA, Brigade de répression de la délinquance astucieuse) are actively pursuing sophisticated operators who pilfer and resell frequent flyer miles.

One such scheme led to indictments this week.

In May 2007, a frequent flier discovered that his account had been debited for a business class New York-Paris flight; the beneficiary was Thomas Mayer, an utter stranger to the client. Air France investigated and called in the authorities.

Since last November, investigating magistrate Anne-Julie Paschal has been on the case. Flying Blue miles turned out to have been fraudulently siphoned from the accounts of 13 Air France clients, including:

• Marc Jacobs, a clothing designer (355 000 miles);
• Pape Diouf, former president of the Marseille football club (520 000 miles);
• Jean-Louis Triaud, head of the Bordeaux football club (315 000 miles);
• Lilian Thuram, a football star (425 000 miles);
• David Trezeguet, a football star (60 000 miles).

The common element in all the transactions: reservations were made from a single mobile phone.

That mobile phone belongs to Sandrine F. Along with Khaled H. and Laila M, both Air France employees, Sandrine F. and her husband were indicted this week.

Sandrine F.’s husband, Pierre Moustapha Diouf (better known as Mouss Diouf), is famous in France as co-star of a long-running television series.

The series, Julie Lescaut, showcases the eventful professional and personal life of a female police chief, Julie Lescaut; Diouf co-stars as Inspector Justin N’Guma, who works under Lescaut.

According to detailed reporting in Le Point, Diouf thought he saw familiar police tactics when questioned: “They did a ‘good cop, bad cop’ number on me. I know that because I’ve played in crime dramas. That couldn’t work on me.”

No more recent reaction has been forthcoming from Diouf, because he’s been in a coma.

Just hours after being questioned by police, Diouf suffered a serious cerebral hemorrhage, his second this year. Since this summer, Diouf has been hospitalized in intensive care, with a respirator. The actress who plays Julie Lescaut recently posted on the series’ web site news of Diouf’s medical condition, with reserved optimism.