Talk to the Snail

resist.

Jobs for the Garçons

Given all these incentives to laze about at work, it’s a wonder that the French get anything done. But they do. Without making a fuss, they build bridges, motorways, railways, whole new towns, with incredible speed.

Part of the reason for this is that they don’t really listen to environmental opposition. So what if a few sandal-wearing tree-lovers don’t want the new TGV line to slice through their valley? People need to get to the beach or the ski resorts quickly. So the new line gets built in less time than it takes to fix a date for an initial public inquiry in Britain.

Another reason is that major building projects are kept in the French family.

Compare, for example, France’s and England’s national stadiums. The French decided to build a new stadium for the 1998 World Cup, so they gave the job to French firms and it was finished in January, six months before the tournament began. England decided it needed a new stadium, knocked down the old one, outsourced the building work to a foreign firm¹¹ and immediately lost all control of the to a foreign firm budget and deadline. The result – it was late and turned out to be the most expensive stadium in world history.

Vive la méthode française.

Inefficient Efficiency

We Anglo-Saxons are forever giving ourselves targets. This makes us feel very efficient, even if we fail to meet them. Yes, we boast, we have increased the number of daily targets by 10 per cent. OK, we missed 90 per cent of those targets, but by setting ourselves more targets tomorrow we will improve our target-setting efficiency, and produce lots of lovely Powerpoint graphs.

The French give themselves far fewer targets at work, for two main reasons.

First, they spend their whole time at school haunted by targets. Every single thing they do there is graded out of twenty and recorded on a report card. By the time they get to work they’re traumatized by targets.

Second, they daren’t give themselves too many targets because they know they will miss them.¹² But perversely, this lack of goals doesn’t make them less efficient.

Look at the fuss caused by the British obsession with the first-class post. There are probably more British post-office workers studying how to deliver first-class letters on time than there are delivering letters.

The French have two classes of letter, too, but they don’t care about their ‘first class’ (or tarif normal, as they modestly call it) letters arriving within twenty-four hours. French businesses get on with opening the letters they have actually received that morning rather than worrying about the ones that might be on their way.

The Brits are so obsessed with performance statistics that performance actually gets worse. I was recently on a train from London to Luton Airport. I wanted to get off at St Albans, midway along the route. But when we got to the first stop outside Central London, it was announced that because the train was running ten minutes late it would be going direct to Luton Airport so as not to miss its performance target. I, and most of the other passengers, had to get off and wait twenty minutes for the next train. The result: the train was on time but the passengers were late. A stroke of British management genius.

A French train, even one of the slightly worse-for-wear ones on the Paris suburban lines, would never do this. It would trundle on to the terminus, running a few minutes late, and the commuters would finish their newpapers, send a few extra text messages, and not care a bit about the ten minutes they had theoretically lost.

French trains do break down and they can be disastrously late, but over all they are much more efficient than British trains, and I’m sure it’s because the French railways spend less of their resources on studying lateness and more on trains.

Meeting of Minds (and Tongues)

Until I came to work in France, I was under the naïve impression that meetings were meant to produce decisions.

I quickly learned that the purpose of a French meeting is to listen to oneself (and, if absolutely necessary, others) talk. If you want to reach a decision then you’ll have to arrange another meeting.

At the press group where I worked, all meetings were given a start and end time, and woe betide anyone who tried to finish a meeting early. If a meeting to discuss, say, the name of a new magazine was scheduled to last two hours, there was no way that a brilliant name suggested ten minutes into the discussion was ever going to be adopted.

This happened once at a meeting I was actually chairing, and I managed to end the proceedings less than half an hour after they had got under way. When my boss found out about this premature evacuation of the meeting room, she insisted that we hold another meeting to talk about whether we had come to the right decision.

Our meetings rarely had an agenda, and if they did it was almost always ignored. We would get to item two of ten, someone would start philosophizing about an idea they had had while staring at the numbers on the agenda, and suddenly we were so far away from the supposed subject that we would never get back on track. Items three to ten would be forgotten for ever.

Not that this made us less efficient. Sometimes, I realized, it is best not to make decisions. By the time we finally got round to trying to resolve a problem, it would have either solved itself or become irrelevant. It is better to have no decision at all than a wrong or hasty decision.

Again, French ‘inefficiency’ is actually more efficient. Vive l’inaction.

I Strike, Therefore I Am

In my novel A Year in the Merde, there is a running joke that lots of people take seriously. Instead of a plat du jour, a dish of the day, there’s the grève du mois,