Relying on CRM to repair BofA is like treating melanoma with Clinique. It is as if there were a meeting of top managers who addressed the question "How do we absolutely cement for all time our image as a soulless engine of unreconstructed aloofness and greed?" The answer: To reach out to complainers not with live human beings, but bots.

To observe that the French are haughty and uncooperative is a cliche and a scurrilous stereotype, justified only in the narrowest sense that it is constantly proving itself to be true. The vaunted French culture includes not only Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Bonnard, Zola, Proust, Balzac, Baudelaire, Offenbach, Debussy, Berlioz, Bizet and Faure, but also the snub, the shrug and the elevation of xenophobic contempt to high art. Vive la France!

LONDON -- So first, this disclaimer: Comcast and I have a history. It began with a slight customer-service issue -- an installer leaving my house in the middle of a job and never returning -- and escalated into a blog post designed to incite the seething multitudes.

CANNES, June 21 - Note, please, the dateline. The Cannes Lions Festival of Glorious Excess is an annual rite of solstice. So how amusing to be sitting here on this particular Friday with Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP and the man himself nicknamed "June 21st" -- because he is the shortest knight. I can no longer glibly tar Sorrell with such a shallow and disparaging diminutive. To see the man in action is to understand why he is a towering figure in the industry. Positively Clintonian is His Sir-ness.

The time has come to pay the piper. It is Celibacy, Migraine, Aphasia, Accordion and Potty Training Awareness Month. (Separately, not together.) It is also both Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome Awareness Month and Cataract Awareness Month. If you are a celibate transgender accordionist with cataracts, this, my friend, is your time. Now, you might ask, with all this awareness to be aware of, where to find the mind space for everything?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, has transformed Istanbul with office buildings, shopping malls and mega-mosques. His plans for Taksim Square -- which required the clear-cutting of protected green space -- sparked protest, and now Erdogan is facing not only civil unrest but criticism from every sector of society. So what did Erdogan do? He dismissed the protesters as mere looters and blamed the media. The social media.

Carrotmob.org, a movement of do-gooders who have genetically modified the consumer boycott with some Groupon DNA, has created consumer "buycotts." Companies are encouraged to change their practices not with a stick -- the threat of a boycott -- but with a carrot, the promise of new customers. This eliminates the boycott's extortionistic character and replaces it with positive incentive for change.

Last week, Abercrombie & Fitch was pilloried in social media -- and mainstream media -- for obnoxious, self-indicting remarks made by its chairman Mike Jeffries... in 2006. Jeffries has long styled himself a provocateur. So it's no surprise that he's in the middle of a controversy. What's notable is that his arrogance and condescension are catching up to him on a 7-year time delay.

I'm seeing GE in a different, flattering, energy-saving compact fluorescent light -- owing entirely to Focus Forward, a mesmerizing collection of mini-documentary films highlighting -- in GE's words -- "exceptional people and world-changing ideas that have impacted the course of human development ... or with great potential to significantly affect how we live in the next generation." I'm grateful to GE for identifying our common interests and establishing common ground.

Enforced transparency and social media have not only taken every institution from its fortress and relocated it to a glass house -- the whole world is standing outside that house, gaping in. This is a really good time in history for business to behave itself. That means being good to those who depend on you. Customers, employees, neighbors, suppliers, shareholders, the trade -- everybody, everywhere.