three young Colombian entrepreneurs discovered a chemical
process that can be used to turn plastic bags into bricks.1 The
bricks are solid, water resistant and cheap and are used in construc-
tion to build low-cost houses and schools. With this invention, the
entrepreneurs have killed three birds with one stone. First, they
permit poor women to earn a little money by collecting plastic
bags that are often lying on the ground. Second, they contribute to
the cleanup of the planet and oceans. And, third, they help to make
home ownership possible for a great number of people. Of course
the impact of these innovative bricks is still quite limited, but just
imagine for a moment what could happen if it could be scaled up in
all the little villages and cities of the world.
A lot of websites like Good News Network or The Week in Good
World News are dedicated to promoting progress and advances
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in all kinds of different domains. But the site with arguably the
greatest impact is the Huffington Post (renamed HuffPost in 2017).
Its founder, Arianna Huffington, had become alarmed by the fact
that people watching the news or reading the newspapers were
faced with an appalling vision of the world we live in. Armed
conflict, terrorism, financial crises, assorted crimes—all of this
is our daily lot. Whereas it’s obviously essential to keep people
informed, for Huffington, the general impression created is too
unbalanced. As she has said: “There are a lot of horrible things
happening in the world but it is not 95% bad!”2 This is why she
decided to shine a light on people who are doing and inventing
things to resolve the problems of our world. The Huffington Post
focuses on actions that are constructive.
The impact of positive initiatives, such as the one from
Colombia, may be limited, but Huffington considered it her
duty to make them known. The media, she said, “should give
them more oxygen.” So she included on her site several sections
like “What’s Working,” “Good News,” and “The Best Feel-
Good Headlines From Last Week.” To quote the journalists at
Huffington Post, “Any time you feel depressed, you can go there
and feel optimistic about the world and human nature again.”3
In this way, Huffington challenged what social media thrives
on: the bad news that feeds the buzz. This is just one of the many
innovations coming from the Huffington Post. As we will see, its
entire model is disruptive.
the Consecration of Online Journalism
Back in 2005, the editorial staffs of the print media naively
thought that confronting the Internet revolution could be ac-
complished simply by reproducing newspaper articles online.
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159
Lots of more or less niche news blogs already existed,
addressing narrow groups of readers. Then, along came
Huffington. Her project was of quite a different dimension. Her
online journal was simultaneously a media company and a col-
laborative platform. It was a news site based on interactions
between journalists and Internet readers to a degree never
before achieved. She knew she could harness the explosion of
information. The amount of digital data produced online in
2006 alone was three million times the material of all the books
ever written. “It only took six months for the Huffington Post to
surpass the web traffic of the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times and the Washington Post.”4
Huffington disrupted conventional journalism and gave
respectability to digital news reporting. She did this in multi-
ple ways. First, she understood very early on the importance of
social networking and the role celebrities would play. When the
Huffington Post was just beginning, she had no hesitation in flip-
ping through her address book and asking people like George
Clooney, Alec Baldwin, or Madonna to write for the site for free.
Then, after having called upon the stars, she opened up her
site to the world, to the non-famous people who had something
interesting to say. And she allowed them to publish their arti-
cles alongside those of the big-name authors. Thousands and
thousands of people responded to such an opportunity. This
unremunerated content generation, an unusual practice at the
time, was the foundation of her economic model.
Huffington has been called the “Queen of Aggregation.”5
She knew better than anyone how to give new life to content
that had already appeared elsewhere, often by expanding upon
or reducing the coverage, and giving it a catchier headline. She
even used a system of A/B testing between headlines to measure
which would generate the most traffic. She told her detractors
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that this allowed her to give more visibility to the articles and to
their authors, via the links she provided to the source.
Beyond external volunteer columnists, the site’s editorial staff
has been strengthened over time. It has counted up to 250 writ-
ers and reporters in 2017, some of whom have received presti-
gious journalistic awards and recognition. At the end of the day,
Huffington has turned her site into an editorial meeting place
for celebrities, journalists, and the general public. It is a perfect
blend. More than just an aggregator, she was actually an incom-
parable gatherer.
She also understood better than anyone a major characteris-
tic of online journalism. Not only does the news need to evolve
in real time, but it also needs to be delivered in a particular way.
Algorithms allow maximum interactivity with readers, leading
to content being constantly fine-tuned and adjusted. As declared
Kenneth Lerer, one of her associates, commenting on the fact
that articles are always being reviewed and corrected, “digital is
painting in oil.”6
Huffington’s critics have qualified her approach as being mer-
cantile. It is true that she had a clear mind of what the general
public wanted to read, and how to present it, and this often led
to comparisons of Huffington Post with tabloids. I imagine she
didn’t pay too much attention to these remarks. Maybe she knew
that Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were held
in low esteem by established journalists. Yet, this didn’t stop
Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896, from
paying tribute to them. He said: “Such papers as The World and
The Journal exist because the public wants them. I hold that some
of their features are open to criticism, but each of them has done
infinitely more good than harm.”7 Over 100 years later, one can
say without contest that Huffington did the same.
In 2012, the Huffington Post was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
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Women in Business
I wanted to evoke Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington in
t
his book, because they are both emblematic women entrepre-
neurs who have disrupted the business environments in which
they operate. And each, in her own way, has battled for the
equality of the sexes, for true emancipation of women, so that
their voices may carry as powerfully as those of men.
I remember a campaign that ran back in the eighties. It was
for a major French mail order company. The tagline my agency
created stated that the future belongs to women. It sounds beau-
tiful in French: “Demain sera féminin,” meaning “Tomorrow
belongs to women.” It was written 30 years ago, and it is regret-
table to note that tomorrow is still late in coming.
The glass ceiling is still there. Today in the United States,
“men still hold 95 percent of the CEO positions and about 85
percent of all executive positions of Fortune 500 companies.”8
And in 10 years, the percentages have only shifted a point or two.
This major gender imbalance is obviously highly distressing.
In 2014, the Huffington Post explained that “gender equality
for women cannot happen without men.”9 And it exhorted its
male readers to fully engage in pursuing equality between the
sexes. No change can happen unless the men who are currently
leading businesses truly accept that the promotion of equality is
not just a moral obligation, but also a strategic necessity. Gender
equality is not a nice-to-have, it is a business imperative.
Countless studies have demonstrated the point to which
equality in the workplace increases productivity. Giving senior
responsibility to women allows companies to better under-
stand half of the world’s population. This is pretty obvious. It
also provides them the opportunity to acquire better insights
into the people who make the majority of household purchasing
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decisions. Additionally, women own nearly half of the shares of
publicly traded companies in the United States. You could ask
yourself what the business world is waiting for to give them more
access to senior positions.
A greater number of women are going to college. In the
United States,10 the percentage of female graduates in the labor
force has risen from 11 percent in 1970 to more than 42 per-
cent today. In most Western countries, women now surpass men
in terms of postgraduate education. As we have all seen, when
women join companies, they bring with them new, different
ways of seeing things. They possess qualities that are indispens-
able to the world of business. We know that having diverse opin-
ions and experiences around the table increases the chances of
producing new thinking. Earlier in this book, I talked about the
deficit of innovation that exists in a great number of companies.
Increasing the number of women in decision-making positions
should be one of the first responses to this deficit.
Things are, nevertheless, beginning to change, even in
places where it’s least expected, such as in Silicon Valley. In one
Huffington Post article,11 a contributor underlined that “women
are the most disruptive force in tech.” This is not just backed
up by the cases of Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook or Marissa
Mayer during her time at Yahoo! The author cites as examples
the dozens of women on the rise in companies such as Twit-
ter, Microsoft, Google, and Pinterest. Today, women are filling
approximately half of the new tech jobs.
The same article pointed out that 200 women were founders
or co-founders of the 125 most successful tech start-ups of the
last decade, with stock-market capitalization above $50 million.
Another striking statistic is that tech companies led by women
have, on average, a 12 percent higher annual revenue than their
equivalents led by men. These same companies required a third
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163
less capital employed to achieve these results. The time for pro-
crastination is over. It has become urgent to permanently remove
all barriers to equality.
Time goes on. In 2011, Huffington and other shareholders of
the Huffington Post sold the company for about $315 million. This
offers further proof, if needed, of the power of her business model.
A few months later, she launched a new adventure: Thrive Global,
a platform focused on health and wellness. She has developed work-
shops and courses on work-life balance. This project continues the
work Huffington started in two books she published, Thrive and
The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time.
She chose a subject that at first appears merely interesting, but
it is actually crucial. It concerns the effects of lack of sleep, includ-
ing stress. She denounces the illusion that to succeed, working
people too often think that they should always be connected. She
seeks to end the “macho culture of burnout and overwork.”12 She
wrote an open letter to one man in particular—a familiar business
figure who sleeps very little; works 120 hours a week; and spent his
47th birthday, all 24 hours of it, at work. The man is Elon Musk,
and this is part of what she wrote to him:
You’re a science and data-driven person. You’re obsessed with
physics, engineering, with figuring out how things work. So
apply that same passion for science not just to your products
but to yourself. People are not machines. For machines—
whether for the First or Fourth Industrial Revolution variety—
downtime is a bug; for humans, downtime is a feature. The
science is clear. And what it tells us is that there’s simply no
way you can make good decisions and achieve your
world-changing ambitions while running on empty.
Working 120-hour weeks doesn’t leverage your unique
qualities, it wastes them. You can’t simply power through—
that’s just not how our bodies and our brains work. Nobody
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knows better than you that we can’t get to Mars by ignoring
the laws of physics. Nor can we get where we want to go by
ignoring scientific laws in our daily lives.13
Huffington explains that stress penalizes companies because
it reduces productivity. She underlines another imbalance14:
women who experience job-related stress have a 40 percent
higher risk of heart disease and 60 percent greater risk of diabetes.
As a consequence, companies that want women—and all
employees—to reach their full potential should seriously recon-
sider their workplace culture. It is an absolute necessity. This
was confirmed by a McKinsey 2015 report15 entitled “Diversity
Matters.” It shows that companies in the top quartile for gen-
der diversity on their executive teams are 15 percent more likely
to have above-average financial returns than those in the fourth
quartile. In 2018, this number rose to 21 percent.
A greater presence of women in business will mean a brighter
future for business as a whole. Each day that does
not go in this
direction is a day lost. The slowness of change in this regard
is unacceptable. It’s why Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey,
and thousands of other women, and men, have multiplied their
calls to action. Winfrey focuses more on challenges in pri-
vate life, for example, by combatting violence against women.
Huffington focuses more on the sphere of business, by fighting
for the accession of women to the boardroom. But their mis-
sions blend together. As the McKinsey Global Institute noted,
“Gender equality at work is not achievable without gender equal-
ity in society.”16
PART
FIVE
DISRUPTIVE SOCIAL
PURPOSE
Social consciousness among business leaders is not new.
I begin this part on corporate social responsibility (CSR)
by paying tribute to Sarah Breedlove, better known as Madam C.
J. Walker. In her time she was the wealthiest African-American
woman and the “nation’s first self-made female millionaire.”1
She was also one of the first entrepreneurs in America to make
social purpose and business work together. After having fought
for civil rights for Blacks all her life, she donated a large part of
her fortune to charity upon her death in 1919.
She was born in 1867, a few years after Abraham Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents were former
cotton plantation slaves, and Breedlove started with absolutely
nothing—and with the odds stacked against her. Orphaned at
the age of 7, married at 14, and widowed with a daughter at 20,
she worked long and hard for a pittance, up until 1905. That
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year, starting from scratch, she created the C. J. Walker Manu-
facturing Company, through which she developed and sold her
own line of hair care products.
Her star products included a hair lotion and a pomade made
from extracts of traditional African herbs. Her life took her way
beyond her tough childhood and challenging early life, and she
became a legendary entrepreneur and philanthropist. At the
National Negro Business League Convention in July 1912, she
declared, “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of
the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I
was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted
myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and prepa-
Thank You for Disrupting Page 17
