Posts filed under 'Personal'
Opening day (the commissioning of Barcelona’s Airport Terminal 1)
Unbelievable we’re already here. After six years of dedicating an important part of my professional life to Barcelona’s Airport, today Terminal 1 is officially born. We’ll listen to the politicians’ speeches on how they made this possible. Maybe they did, but we worked all the way through. And this feeling, this pride, this sense of belonging will carry on with us the rest of our (professional) lives.
A huge, unique project can only be done with the commitment of a group of people. A group of people ready to withstand many pressures and surmount uncountable odds. Very diverse people, some very qualified, some able to star and shine without that qualification.
There are some pass-byers as well. The latter will be all in the official celebration today, even publicly displaying their self-attributed mothering. Isn’t it sad that people that have not appeared in the life of the project, and could have done things to support it, they come now for the medal?
We’ve learnt many things here. We’ve lived through many successes, and mistakes too. Fortunately! You can’t learn if you always do everything well. It would give you a false sense of security that would undermine your judgement.
But even if you make mistakes, you can’t learn unless you can reflect on past experiences. Unless you can evolve. That’s our duty today as nucleus of the project that has created the biggest Spanish airport terminal of all times, the biggest infrastructure that has been built in Barcelona for the last decades. We must make this exercise and learn.
Nothing of this would have been possible without the engineers. People think of architects, but they only make a small part of the project: they don’t make things work. Specially star architects that have seldom appeared during the project and have been more of a nuisance than anything. Till now this was the realm of the engineers. It was our time. Not any longer. Now it’s turn for the airlines and for the people that maintain the airport to work. It’s time for the passengers, for Catalans, to make this terminal their own. This terminal will be the first, and last, thing that visitors to Barcelona, and Catalonia, will see. It’s for all of us.
Yes, that was yesterday. And I was there. And from the experience I can tell you that I felt that my commitment for this project for so many years had been worth it. I feel as I have participated in something big, something important for my country. And this, in itself, is a reward as well for me.
2 comments 17 June, 2009
A weekend in Cologne (Köln) and some bits of European construction
I’ve been this weekend in Cologne, an amazingly thriving city on the Rhine born about 50BC as a Roman outpost. A city that grew in the industrial revolution thanks to the enterprisingness of its inhabitants that strategically used their proximity to the coal of the Ruhr region.
Catholics, in 1248 they began the construction of their cathedral. It would stop in 1560 for as long as four centuries, with a crane that would be Cologne’s symbol and witnessed lots of generations live and die. Until 1848 you could have seen something like this…
This was the tallest building of the wold as well, until the Washington Monument’s capstone was set in 1884.
Let’s make another step in time to 1945 after the second World War. Cologne was obliterated with bombings. Less than 10% of its buildings survived. One of them was the Cathedral. Although hit by several bombs, maybe miraculously, the Dom still stood in the middle of a lake of rubble.
Little remains of those years. Where Adolf Hitler rallied his troops, now there’s a lake where students gather instead to have fun and drink beer. Now Cologne is a cosmopolite city, a mix of cultures and lifestyles, somewhat disordered for a German city, but very much alive and breathing. It is the broadcast centre in Germany, the fourth biggest city and see to many international art festivals. Their inhabitants celebrate the good weather sitting in the terraces at night and have one of the largest Karnevals, or Mardi Gras, in Germany. Last Saturday’s view was quite different:
Yes, I went there to study, to prepare the forthcoming exam on Strategic Direction and Corporate Finance and Governance with my German peers on the MBA. We had a great time and also worked a lot.
Now for European construction. We saw the next election’s publicity in many streets. I saw it again in Barcelona, when I came back yesterday. I read the newspapers and saw, to my amazement, how Spanish politicians are using the European elections to talk about local issues, even to try to condone some misbehavings some of their numbers have committed.
Our politicians, and I do thing that’s an European wide issue, are inadvertently but irresponsibly turning us away from democracy with their constant cynicism, hypocrisy and abuse. And our democracies, our peace, our union and our prosperity are the most valued shared good that we have. They are the only guarantee that neither Cologne nor Barcelona’s inhabitants, both cities whose civilian population have been bombed by air, each from a different political side, as if it mattered now or then to any crying child whose life had been severed, are not going to endure that cruelty anymore.
We are the ones benefiting and inadvertently collaborating to the European Union by travelling, by getting to know each other, by learning to respect our difference, by meeting to study an MBA from a British business school in a German roaring town.
I’m going to miss Cologne… it is a city I could live in!
2 comments 25 May, 2009
Banco Santander: a rising star (but not that bright)
If you’ve been reading in the news on how Banco Santander is covering its customers over Madoff’s losses, and how it’s been cherry picking some banks in distress, as well as not using the Spanish’s government toxic assets relief measures you’ll be thinking that they are a rising star. And they are, I won’t be the one to deny that, but maybe they are not rising as much as it might look like. In any case, in comparative terms, their are enjoying a privilleged position, especially because the rest of competitors are worse off. The star ain’t that bright.
Santander, a beautiful port city in the north of Spain
Let’s focus on the bank’s last announcement where they claim to be covering their customer’s losses. Let’s go deeper into the figures for some interesting hints.
The bank is including in its 2008 books an extraordinary expense of €500 million with that purpose. Wait! Weren’t they €1,680 million?
Okay. Here’s the trick. Santander is emitting new preferential shares, creatures born half-debt half-shares. Those, in 10 years will be worth €1,680 million less any increment of the initial fund deposit and the earnings to the present date of those funds (whatever that figure might be). What is insured is the initial investment, nothing else. It will be recovered not now, but in ten years. And with no actualisation at all.
For any investor that means bearing a couple of huge opportunity costs: the one already borne and the one that lays ahead. That’s how €1,680 million transform into 500€. The preferential shares will be liquid in ten year’s time. In the meantime yielding a mere 2% per year.
So, what should an investor do? Some will think about it, if its true that, when they invested, Santander was selling these funds as their own trademark, not referring to the real custodian behind. It’s great to sell something that works well solely under your name, as long as it keeps working well! And that entails a responsibility.
But many will simply sign this rebate deal and forget about it. And with the deal the compulsory renounce of any legal claims against Santander, and the curious obligation to keep working with them for the next decade. Not too bad for many considering the alternative of entering a judicial quagmire that will carry expenses for sure as uncertain the outcome may be.
And here comes the final reflection that, from my point of view, explains many things about the Spanish banks. People in Spain, unlike in the US, take their time to assume their losses. At the moment there’s not property market in Spain as people are not selling, waiting for hint of hope to recover what they paid for it. And, as long as there are no transactions, there are no prices.
With raising unemployment covered by benefits that won’t last forever, eventually, many people will have to face reality. So will the Spanish banks. If Santander is betting that, when this moment comes, the worst will be over and the economy will be going upwards, I’m really sorry to bet in the opposite direction.
Add comment 29 January, 2009
Are we in a liquidity trap? (am I blind or is this another black swan?)
Liquidity traps are one of those obscure concepts hidden into macroeconomics books. Obscure enough to occupy some marginal comment only and disputed enough to be denied by the Austrian School of Economics. Ludwig von Mises would label them as myths. But, as mytical as a black swans that have recenty decided to come out of their closets and start teambuilding in the Thames, are we going to face this myth soon as well?
When Sir John Hicks thought of the IS-LM model, he already thought of liquidity traps somehow, but it was the first Baron Keynes (also known as John Maynard Keynes) who shaped the concept (did Ludwig von Mises need a better reason to label them as myths?).
The idea is simple. With the IS-LM model, cutting the interest rate is the scape from any recession, as we make more money available into the system to boost growth and employment. But, does more available money always equate more growth?
There’s a obvious limit to this: interest rates cannot be negative (hmmm, let’s leave it like this for a minute…) so there’s obviously a limit to monetary policies, that is when rates reach zero. Are we there yet? Well, the following table borrowed from Bloomberg can help:
Regardless of the fact that we are getting there, what if the rate where monetary policy became ineffective was not zero but higher? That’s in fact the idea behind liquidity traps. What if the banks and the firms -in short, people- became risk averse enough that they preferred the liquidity of cash to offering it to others at low rates?
In other words, what happens if the free-risk situation is no longer perceived as risk-free? How should this extra aversion to lending be rewarded?
The conclusion from Keynes was that there would be a point where monetary policies would be ineffective and the economy would remain trapped in recession. Then only fiscal policy, that would be a lot of government spending, would do the trick. But are we psicologically prepared for this extra spending and increased budget deficit and debt? Will the debt attract enough financing? Will the solution even deepen the liquidity trap by substracting even more money from the private sector?
There’s still a way to have negative interest rates and that’s thanks to inflation. After all with inflation our money inside the sock loses value every day. And an expansive monetary policy should raise inflation. (hmmm, look at inflation dropping and that other scary, even mytical word too: deflation) Even though, with a low enough interest rate, and with the current global scare, many people may choose to still leave it there.
Yes, a liquidity trap is a rare think. It may have happened in Japan long ago, even in the US in the previous recession (Krugman would say, and Reisman deny). May we already be into one?
Add comment 9 January, 2009
Back from Switzerland (and missing it already)
Back from Switzerland and missing it already. One week of skiing and cheese eating is not enough. I’m going to miss those great valleys, the Geneva Lake, the snow: Champery, Avoriaz, Morgins, Torgon, Chatel, the people, the order, the commitment to having the roads and the trains ready regardless of the weather (in Barcelona our distant-managed-from-the-capital trains just stop when it snows too much). Yes, I’m missing Switzerland already.
To my amazement I’ve discovered I speak an peu du French. We Catalonians are born bilinguals, breathing both Catalan and Spanish since we are born, so learning a third language is not that difficult as we are already wired for it. In my case my third language is English, which I am proud to say I am able to use it effectively. But when I was a kid, and TV channels were still a scarce resource, we lived close enough to the French border to watch French TV and Jean Paul Belmondo’s great action movies. (Catalonia spans a bit further north into France, cut by nation-states seeking natural limits, cutting that only a few countries survived: Switzerland is the most prominent example).
Sorry for the mental rambling. The fact is that I could understand French very well, and even managed to communicate. At the end of the week I even dared to make my first jokes in French 
Now, I have decided to improve my French. More things to do, still the same time. Business as usual for an MBA student. 
The great view is from Torgon, in the top of the Jorette piste. If you looked backwards you could see the Mont Blanc not that far aways, if you look down you can see the Genève (or Leman) Lake. The picture was not mine as mine wasn’t that good. On the other hand we had a lot more snow.
Now, time to work again. An airport and an MBA are waiting, so is my soon-to-improve French.
4 comments 7 January, 2009
Blogging from the Opera (blogging with Figaro)
Less than two weeks into an important milestone for the airport’s operational readiness and less than three weeks from my marketing and business environment exam, I find myself blogging from el Liceu, Barcelona’s opera house. Amidst this quagmire that my daily job has been turning into, I still could scape to enjoy Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. It really sounds strange in English instead of Italian’s: Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata.
Yes, the second name for the opera is “the day of madness”. That’s how I live my days at work now. Trying to cope with unmatching requirements, trying to sync reality with political requirements. But, as I like to say, reality is too stubborn for that. And we always end up crashing with a concrete wall which we could have avoided. But that’s second nature to us, humans. Why is it that reality ends up resembling just another opera buffa?
Yet here I am. Everyone needs a place to hide. And that’s mine today. I even could open my computer in the bar in the basement, use my HSDPA connection and write this lines while sipping a coffee. Watch the old ladies ingest huge quantities of sugar and chocolate in different shapes and colours. Isn’t life nice after all?
The thing is that when I began the MBA I promised to reflect. And these latter days have been so amazing. So many different things happening from a global perspective, at work and even a personal perspective. And I don’t want to feel that the many things that flow around me just do that: flow. I need to capture some of them. I need to retain, absorb, think, grow.
They say that experience is everything, that you actually learn by doing. And that is a blatant lie. Well, you learn, true, but only in a mechanical way. As Figaro doesn’t actually learn about Almaviva until he actually sees him fishing in his waters, or Almaviva doesn’t learn about behaving until his infidelity is publicly exposed. The aristocracy depicted, ridiculised here didn’t learn on time to change. Until it was too late. Pierre Beaumarchais saw his play censored in France, only to be played in 1778, with the French Revolution almost at the doors…
You learn when you think about what you live. When you think of improving what you’ve already learnt to do mechanically. When you make it grow inside of you. When you go one step further to accepting what is already established, what is already known. When you apply something more than common sense. When you’re not scared of rethinking something that is already working (apparently).
When I give project management classes, I always stress how important is the “post-mortem” analysis at the end of the project to clarify not only what we have done well but also what we could have done better and what we have learnt from the experience. Now I feel that the end is too far, too late. It must be done now and again, in a continuous process of taking a step back, getting perspective, digesting, and then going in again with regained strengths that will not hold us back from stepping out of the comfort zone. Every manager should take some time to learn now and then.
And now, let’s enjoy this opera
Add comment 18 November, 2008
The ant, the grashopper and the interest rates
I sincerely wished I could write about something else, but these days I’ve been spending a great deal of the time I don’t have absorbed by the financial markets.
And I’ve come to think of Aesop’s fable (click here for the Wikipedia entry): the ants and the grasshoppers, and the way they would have related to interest rates.
Since the ants are the hard-working ones in the fable. They are the ones that build the real economy, the ones that have their savings in the bank, in the safest financial products. On the other hand the grasshoppers don’t really worry about working hard, they are prone to risk and they aim for quick profits, regardless of the consequences.
Okay, now with the interest rates. Reasonably low interest rates benefit the ants because they can access funding with a reasonable price and still get a basic return for their savings while keeping them safe for the future. After all they are risk-averse creatures.
But if the interest rates go too low, close to nil, then it’s the time for the grasshoppers. Who cares about saving, who cares about the long term while short term is cheaper and you can still carry-trade. Short-term benefits are in order, even castles in the sand if they can be sold somehow, and when there’s no limit to the castles in the sand you can build, there’s no limit to growth. Screw Kondratiev!
In the end, it seems that the ants will end up saving the grasshoppers, just like in the fables. Lesson learned… or is it not?
4 comments 3 October, 2008
The holidays are over (still here after a busy summer)
Another year is over, and I’m left cold sober. That’s how a song from Queen begins. In my case it has been an interesting but feverish year. I’ve done so many things that I can’t recall them all.
My first year in the Henley MBA is over. I have passed all three exams and I feel relieved, I had my doubts that I’d pass them all. Henley Management College has just become Henley Business School in the University of Reading. That means a lot for the future prospects of the school as it will make new additional resources available to reach new heights. It’s good news.
We had a workshop about global business environment and strategic marketing. I especially liked the first part, reflecting about the global economy and how the different economic areas in the world compare, and the current macroeconomic trends.
Later, reflecting about it, I envisioned myself as an agent of globalisation. After all I had been a few days earlier seeking business in Delhi. I can’t write much about it but Spanish companies do need to go out and compete, and who is going to do that if it is not ourselves?
Yes, that’s the Taj Mahal as captured by my mobile phone. That was one outstanding moment of the summer. I will never forget this image.
In the meantime things are on track for Barcelona’s new terminal. The building is almost complete and we are testing the first systems. The last sneak peek is from one of the busiest commercial areas. A few systems are already installed and the first system trials will begin in one month. Below is an image of the first screen ever working there, still on the floor although the support structures are already installed.
The bottom line: I’m still here. I’ll keep you appraised
Add comment 18 August, 2008
Upgrading my MacBookPro’s hard drive (tweaking some hardware)
Yes, I’ve been busy lately. I know. Building an airport and acting as a globalisation agent is hard sometimes. If you also need to find time to study, things even get trickier. And then your loyal ally tells you that its hard drive is full… well, you get the picture.
Don’t ask me how I managed to fill my 160 gigs hard drive. I just did. And while I was away I realised I wanted a windows emulator at hand because interchanging files between Mac’s Office 2008 and PC’s Office 2004 is not that easy. Sometimes weird things happen (thank-you Microsoft) and you need a bridge inbetween.
Yes, I do need to carry most of my music with me wherever I go. And I like watching StarGate and Yes Minister from the computer while I’m flying somewhere. I am not ashamed of that!
The thing is that I needed a bigger hard drive. And instead of going to the closest Apple center and paying 300€ for the operation I decided to buy a 60€ Fujitsu drive, the same quality that Apple offers of course, and do it myself. The tools: a torque 6 screwdriver, a Philips ++ screwdriver and a sound methodology not to mix and lose the screws.
The first two you can find in any hardware store. The latter at this website: www.ifixit.com, as well as any accessories you might need.
First of all I made a copy of my hard drive. SuperDuper is the application to use. You can find it here. Encase your new hard drive in an external USB or Firewire unit, format in GUID, copy the whole drive and you are done. After you have an external copy verify it by booting from it holding the “Option” key at boot.
Opening a MacBook Pro to change the hard drive is trickier than one might think. Thanks again to ifixit for this comprehensive foolproof guide. I won’t bother you with the procedure, some highlights may suffice:
Opening the case after removing almost every screw, scary, huh?
The guts of a MacBook Pro. The hard drive is on the left. That’s the moment when you have to detach the wires connecting the keyboard (top center) and hard drive (left). Will they ever work again?
The final moment of glory: when you swap the old 160 gigs Hitachi for the new 320 gigs Fujitsu. In any case the hard drive is still Japanese.
Then I did the same steps in opposite order to put back every single screw in its right place, crossed my fingers and voilà, the thing simply worked. I love my Mac. Even with a virtual PC inside it, that I only needed to copy from my other computer. Right now my virtual PC is upgrading to XP service pack 3… and I’ll need an antivirus…
2 comments 29 July, 2008
Back from India (and from a cultural impact)
I’ve just arrived from Delhi. In fact it has been 24 hours but, in the meantime, my mind kept wandering inbetween all kinds of different landscapes, smells and tastes until it settled back again. So many different faces, so many different paces: our hectic effort of preparing a presentation on the club lounge of a five-star hotel, the five-year-old child making his frenzied small monkey shout and dance to attract our attention and a few coins, the slow-moving cow trying to take a nap in the middle of the street and the agitated drivers trying to pass as close as possible. Definitely distances are measured differently in this huge place.
The billion cattle estimated to be alive today are more less one sixth of the estimated human population on Earth. The lucky ones live here, where they are revered and spoiled, where they can live tranquil and blissful lives, where they can thrive and be loved. It’s a wonder that there is no cow immigration process to this beautifully colored lands. If the other cows knew!
Humanity. This word takes new meaning here. So many people. We Europeans have tended to grow aseptic, almost inhumans. We hide within huge buildings of concrete, glass and steel, like the new terminal I’ve nurtured along with my peers, and we become insignificant below our not-so-functional monuments. We want them to serve as a rule to measure our cities and civilisation, instead of ourselves, our little selves.
In India you see so many people, so many happy -and not so happy- faces. The wonder is that it’s not easy to infer which faces will be happy and which won’t. Usually you won’t see that in the colours -or cost- of the robes. Humans… sometimes so happy owning nothing but conceiving nice thoughts… you never know.
This column, blog, page -whatever this is- wouldn’t be complete without the management reflection. And today it comes from Professor Geert Hofstede, of Maastricht University: “Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.”
Are they? I’m personally a cock-eyed optimist and I tend to see the positive side to it. If we kept narrow mindedly to our own culture and background, the learning process would surely be impaired. Nonetheless cultural divergences must be managed.
As a reference, it is very interesting to examine Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, built from a handful of parameters:
- Power distance or the degree of acceptance of the less favoured members of one society of the inequalities they are subjected to.
- Individualism versus collectivism, or the degree to which the members of a society are integrated into groups.
- Masculinity versus femininity, or the degree of distribution of roles between genders.
- Uncertainty avoidance or degree of tolerance to uncertainty or ambiguity.
- Long-term orientation versus short-termism.
As an example, the former dimensions applied to the Indian, Spanish and British cultural dimensions, according to the available data by Hofstede. Of course generalisations are unfair, and the Spanish profile was never actually completed, but the exercise is still interesting.
4 comments 22 July, 2008
