Building Bridges

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m thrilled to share the conversation I had with Nina Goswami, the BBC’s Creative Diversity Lead.

For over two years now this journalist has been the project lead and most ardent evangelist of the 50:50 Project.

50:50 The Equality Project is committed to inspiring and supporting the BBC and organisations around the globe to consistently create journalism and media content that fairly represents our world.

The initiative, born in the BBC’s London newsroom, uses a methodology that is rooted in data, creativity, practicality and passion to fundamentally shift representation within the media.

There really couldn’t be a more attractive subject for someone like me who despairs over the lack of diversity in French media. During this pandemic, an overwhelming majority of all “experts” interviewed by French journalists on TV and mainstream newspapers have been male (and white). Maybe this interview can inspire them to change the way they work.

For Nina, the best way to spread the word is to make the business case for 50:50:

Then there’s the business element. And I think this is the most powerful one for people who feel that there’s no need to increase women's representation. We as women make up 50 percent of the world's population, actually, 51 percent of the world's population. And if you are not reflecting women on your content, then you are not likely to be attracting women to your content. 

One of the really interesting things that we've seen over the past couple of years that 50:50 has been in existence is that people are noticing an increase in women's representation on BBC content, and that's having a really positive effect. 32 percent of women aged 24 to 35 are actually consuming more BBC online content than they have ever before.

We've seen in our target audience because we're trying to attract more young people to the BBC (16-to-24-year olds) that 40 percent of them are enjoying content more as a result. So if they're enjoying content more, they are likely to be returning to BBC content. Even if you don't care about women's representation, there’s still a business case for doing it.

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, there will a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. Stay tuned.

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m happy to share the conversation I had with Andrew Scott.

I discovered Andrew’s work (and that of his co-author Lynda Gratton) a few years ago when I read their book The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. This book influenced my own work profoundly as I became more and more convinced that increased longevity and ageing of the population play a huge part in shaping the future of work.

The second book they wrote together was published in 2020. The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World is as good as the first. It offers a more practical roadmap for individuals and governments. Adapting to the age of longevity involves all the dimensions of our lives (love, leisure, family life, savings, training, health….). It would be much too shortsighted to be content with just forcing people to postpone retirement.

I read the second book during the pandemic and couldn’t help but wonder, “What does the pandemic change?”, “Doesn’t it make this book all the more relevant?”. That’s why I’m thrilled to share this conversation I had with Andrew in which I asked him all my questions about the books he wrote with Lynda Gratton, and the impact of the pandemic.

Andrew J. Scott is Professor of Economics at London Business School and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. He is co-founder of The Longevity Forum, an organisation aimed at achieving healthier longer lives, and member of the Cabinet Office Honours Committee (Science and Technology).

How you age isn’t destiny. It is profoundly influenced by your actions and beliefs. If you take a chronological approach to your age, then this encourages you to believe ageing occurs at the same fixed, invariant rate for everyone — one year every year. But from the perspective of the malleability of age, this is far from the case. It is fascinating to realise that only a quarter of how you age is genetically determined. That leaves considerable scope for your own actions, as well as events beyond your control, to exert an influence.

The natural rhythm and structure of your life narrative is marked by calendar time and the passing of the years. In the face of longevity, if we want to reimagine age then we must first decouple the idea of a simple link between time and age. That requires imagining your age is malleable — as you live longer and with a greater chance of good health, then what it means to be forty, sixty or eighty years old will change in profound ways. It is the malleability that underpins the redesign of life stages. 

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, there will a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. Stay tuned.

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts.

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m happy to share the conversation I had with Vaughn Tan, author of the book The Uncertainty Mindset.

Vaughn is one of the people I met “miraculously” online during the pandemic. I found out about his book in a newsletter this summer, and thought, “a book about cuisine and uncertainty? I have to read it!” And I did. I loved the book and started chatting with Vaughn via Twitter. Sometimes, there’s some magic left in social networks 🎁Vaughn couldn’t have picked a better year to publish a book about the uncertainty mindset. We ended up talking also about the particular uncertainty of the period and what it changed for him.

An assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship in London, he used to work for Google in California. In short, he knows a lot about innovation and management—both from experience and academic studies.

For his book, he observed the inner workings of R&D labs in high-end cuisine and wrote a captivating account of how top chefs and their teams approach innovation. And for sure these insights can also be relevant for companies in different fields.

At the frontiers of food, I discovered a fundamentally different approach to innovation that I became increasingly convinced was relevant beyond cuisine. Cutting-edge cuisine is a model system for understanding the uncertainty mindset and its consequences for organizations in other industries.

Innovation is inherently truly uncertain. With innovation work, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it or create it. Uncertainty is an inescapable part of trying to do something that has not been done or even imagined before.

The lived reality of innovation work is that it is therefore messy and chaotic, filled with ambiguity and friction. Innovation arises out of creative dissonance between different worldviews, different domains of work, and different ideas of value.

Effective innovation management involves training people and designing teams to be willing and able to discard what they have become good at and become good at something else.

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, there will a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. Stay tuned.

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter!

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the “Building Bridges” podcast, I’m happy to share the conversation I had with Professor Mariana Mazzucato.

Mariana is a professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value and she founded (and directs) their Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), which she talks about in this podcast.

Her book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths was published in 2013, and was translated into many languages. It was (finally) also translated into French and released in France in September 2020 (L'État entrepreneur : Pour en finir avec l'opposition public-privé, Fayard).

The Entrepreneurial State, as well as her most recent The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy feel more relevant than ever in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, public services (in particular health services) were put under strain in this crisis while their “value” was made more obvious to all.

Most governments are now spending on a massive scale to save industries and mitigate the economic consequences of several lockdowns. Mazzucato argues there should be no more “free lunches” (public debt / privatised gains). Governments should use this opportunity to position their economies for a more sustainable future.

Here’s what she wrote recently in a Foreign Affairs article titled “Capitalism After the Pandemic”:

“For too long, governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards: the public has paid the price for cleaning up messes, but the benefits of those cleanups have accrued largely to companies and their investors. In times of need, many businesses are quick to ask for government help, yet in good times, they demand that the government step away.”

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, there will a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. Stay tuned.

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter!

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m happy to share the conversation I had with Bruno Maçães, a political scientist, former Portuguese minister, and author of several books.

His latest is titled History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. It contends that although people believe America to be in decline, it may actually enter a new era of self-reinterpretation. America’s unique strength is its ability to general “virtual reality”, stories—from pilgrims to cowboys to social media and reality TV—which makes it uniquely adaptable.

Here’s how it’s summed up on the book’s back cover:

Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History’s great civilisations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, the US was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn’t the end?

Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America’s future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, Maçães takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilisation in today’s debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. What will its values be, and what will this new America look like?

But before writing about the US, Bruno Maçães published a book about China, and one about the “dawn of Eurasia”. He’s quite unique in that he brings together experience and extensive knowledge about three continents. That’s why I asked him questions about geopolitics and his understanding of the state of the world, China’s ambition, today’s American and the future of Europe.

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, there will a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. Stay tuned.

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter!

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

Today I’m delighted to share a conversation that I recently had with James Crabtree, author of the landmark book The Billionaire Raj 🇮🇳

I’ve been passionate about Asia in general and India in particular for a very long time, and this focus is present in this podcast, alongside many other topics such as tycoons in the business world, the Netflix documentary Bad Boy Billionaires: India, in which James is featured, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, how the pandemic has impacted Asia, and life in Singapore, where James lives with his family.

I was introduced to James by my husband Nicolas, who met him last year in Singapore. Here’s what Nicolas wrote in an edition of his newsletter European Straits earlier this year, What’s Happening in India?

James’s book, The Billionaire Raj, is the best introduction to the current situation in India, from both an economic and a political perspective.

[A key] idea that frames James’s book is that the Indian path to development might be similar to what the US went through in the 19th century. Before America discovered the concept of the middle class and became prosperous thanks to it, the country went through a phase known as the “Gilded Age”. It was when inequalities reached a high point, a clique of oligarchs (the “Robber Barons”) basically owned the government, and any attempt at inventing a more favorable social contract for the many was quickly squashed. And yet despite that period, the US ended up unleashing a formidable growth engine that eventually benefited most Americans, not only those at the top of the social ladder.

As the title says, James’s book is focused on the Indian billionaire class; in it, he insists on the fact that since the end of the Licence Raj, India has become one of the world’s most unequal countries. Yet the current mix of political tension, cronyism, fast-pace innovation, and massive infrastructure spending (which is often related to cronyism 🤔) resembles the American Gilded Age so much that there’s a credible scenario in which India moves forward and learns to combine stability, economic security for the many, and widespread prosperity at the national level.

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it. Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, we’ll create a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. To be continued…

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter!

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s myLaetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

I’m very happy to start this new series of podcasts with an interview of Leslie Kern, whose book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World (2020) I found so inspiring. Leslie is an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University, in Canada.

With the pandemic and much political, economic and social chaos, 2020 generated lots of questions about cities, urban life, and activism. Many people wonder whether cities still have a future. I’m sure they do. But maybe more so if they are “feminist cities”. And that’s why Leslie Kern’s ideas are even more relevant than ever.

She is “proud to call [herself] a feminist geographer”. Twenty years ago, people may have mocked the idea that geography could be sexist or feminist. Today more people understand that urban planning does indeed have consequences on gender equality, and that we need to take more diverse points of view into account to make housing and infrastructure better for all.

As I wrote in a Laetitia@Work newsletter on the subject of feminist cities:

This means we can’t let urban planning be designed by default for the nuclear family. First, the nuclear family default is not great for feminism. Second, the traditional nuclear family is no longer the norm: there are so many single-parent families, single people, same-sex couples, and all sorts of alternative family arrangements that the traditional 1950s nuclear family is now in the minority. A “feminist city” is an inclusive city that makes life easier for more people.

I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it. Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗

For access to the full transcript, we’ll create a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. To be continued…

Follow Building Bridges on Twitter!

* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s my Laetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.

(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com