Philippe Buschini Posts

📌 Friday mood post 📌

What if the biggest lie in the modern workplace boiled down to a single word?

Not “synergy.” Not “agility.” Not even “co-construction” or “productivity.”
The real poison is subtler. It smells like lavender, wears a smile, and proudly sits on every HR slide deck.

Its name is HAPPINESS.

Welcome to the 21st-century workplace, where you’re no longer expected to think, let alone produce.
You’re expected to be aligned, centered, inspired… all while juggling four projects, three pointless meetings, and a “mindful check-in” with your agile manager who’s too busy perfecting his inner Japanese garden between two slides on empathic synergy.

In this world, competence is a glitch to be corrected. Quality work? A reactionary relic.

What really matters is your SMILE RATE in the open space, your 360° observable zen level, and your fluent use of corporate doublespeak—like saying “strategic alignment” when you actually mean “total chaos.”

You thought you had a job?

No. You’re living in an emotionally therapeutic fiction, complete with tight budgets, blurry KPIs, lukewarm detox juices, and a group breathing coach every Wednesday.

#ZenCorporation #CompassionateBullshit #SmileyOrDie #MandatoryKindness

OPINION COLUMN

While 6-year-old Chinese children are learning to train AI models to recognize insects in their gardens, French kids the same age are discovering… how to open a word processor.

This gap isn’t just a detail. It’s the symptom of a strategic chasm opening before our very eyes.

On one side, China deploys a plan of breathtaking ambition: 12 years of progressive AI learning to transform every citizen into a “digital native.” The result? It already produces 50% of the world’s top AI researchers compared to 18% for the United States.

On the other, France has just decided “once and for all” after… 4 months of consultation that mobilized 500 contributions. Out of 1.2 million people in the national education system. That’s 0.04% of the educational community.

The French verdict? AI will be authorized starting from 8th grade only, with mandatory training of 30 minutes to 1.5 hours maximum to master the “basics of prompting.” Between reminders about server water consumption.

While Beijing trains entire cohorts of children who will grow up with AI as their natural companion, Paris organizes consultations and offers hour-and-a-half micro-modules.

In 10 years, guess who will truly master this technology that’s already redefining global power balances?

History may judge us on our ability to transform a technological revolution… into administrative reform.

OPINION

📌 Friday mood post 📌

💡 Corporate transparency? Come on, who still buys into that?

Every year, it’s the same charade: 247 pages of polished jargon, a PDF buried somewhere on the website, and pastel-colored charts explaining that everything’s going swimmingly, nothing to see here.

Everyone’s happy, aligned, inspired, fulfilled… well, except those we haven’t yet sent to a “cultural realignment cell” between the foosball table and the meditation room. But hey, that doesn’t fit in the infographic.

👉 In the wonderful world of corporate bullshit, transparency has become an art form. A precisely choreographed dance between managerial storytelling, emotional pie charts, and coaches who explain life to you… without ever having lived it outside of keynote presentations.

I wrote this little opinion piece on the subject.
Spoiler: I don’t talk about the coffee machine. Well, maybe a bit.

#TransparencyOnTheCheap #WindowDressingHR #BullshitCoin #GalaStorytelling

OPINION COLUMN

“This AI writes better than I do!”

I hear this sentence at least three times a week. From a marketing director dazzled by ChatGPT. From a graphic designer fascinated by Midjourney. From a student who just discovered that a machine can solve their math exercises in seconds.

And every time, I think to myself: we’ve just crossed an invisible line.

Not the line of technical performance, that’s just computing doing what it’s always done: calculating fast and well. No, we’ve crossed the line of our own devaluation. The one where we start doubting our most human capabilities: thinking, creating, deciding.

As a mathematician who works with AI daily, I see three grand mythological narratives being constructed before our eyes. Three seductive stories that gradually make us abandon something precious: our intellectual autonomy.

The problem isn’t that AI is too performant. It’s that we’re becoming too gullible.

In the lines that follow, I invite you to dissect these three myths with me, myths that are silently redrawing the boundaries of our humanity. Because before knowing what AI can do, it’s about time we remember what we don’t want to lose.

Ready for a little collective exercise in lucidity?

OPINION

📌 Friday mood post 📌

🧙‍♂️ Alchemists spent their lives trying to turn lead into gold.
💼 Modern consultants have no such obsession — they turn gold into procedure… and bill you for the VAT on top.

Take a bright idea, a real spark of inspiration.
Drop it into an Excel spreadsheet, sprinkle some lukewarm jargon, toss in three vague KPIs and a “deliverable” for good measure…
🎯 Congrats, you’ve just created a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound.
✨ A brilliant acronym to standardize genius and organize boredom.

By trying to frame, model, and rationalize everything, we’ve pulled off something quite spectacular: we’ve neutralized creative thinking — without even needing censorship.
All it takes is a process, an evaluation grid, and a good old “kick-off meeting”.

And what if the real, honest, street-level definition of SMART was actually something like this:

– Simplify the complex
– Make meetings meaningful (or at least long)
– Annihilate all originality
– Reduce ambition
– Turn drive into reporting

😂

In this little mood piece, I explore, with a wry smile and a touch of arsenic, how our obsession with deliverables slowly strangles the unexpected, the absurd, and sometimes even… genius itself.

📌 Spoiler: These days, Newton would’ve had to open a Jira ticket for his apple.
And he’d get a Slack reminder to “think inside the box.”

OPINION COLUMN