Gabriel’s scarcity rent - it’s management stupid!

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.

Some weeks are so hectic that you simply don’t have time to write. And if you do, it’s not because you’ve had the chance to sit back and reflect about something, but because you have some free time in-between things to be done. That’s the case for today: a few free minutes.

The day began in Madrid, in the Indian embassy, queuing for such a simple and stupid thing as a visa. It’s incredible how certain processes are still done as the last century, or even the previous one. The fact is that if you want to travel to India from Barcelona, first you must go to Madrid to get your visa. The alternative is waiting around three or four weeks to have it.

And if you went there without a warning, you’d be astonished to know that they only issue a limited number of visas, clearly outnumbered by the people that need them. So the queue starts around two hours before they open. By the time they unlock the doors, there’s enough people waiting to fill the entire waiting room. If you arrive at ten, just forget the visa. Come back tomorrow (in Spanish “vuelva usted mañana” although the Indians speak more English than Spanish). And that’s the only way for the 46 million inhabitants of Spain to visit the 1,100-million-people country.

Well. I finally made it. I was sixth on the line. Then, to the airport to take a plane back to Barcelona. And from the airport to one of Barcelona’s marinas: the Olympic port, built for Barcelona’s Olympics 15 years ago.

From air planes to boats: time to sail. That’s why I am here for. I am to renew my sailing licenses and, following legal requirements, I need several navigation hours with a captain instructor. A good way to ensure that people actually know about boats before granting them the right to sail them. That’s what I am here for.

Time for the final comment. Where is management in all this? Well. Ask it to Captain Marcos Rivera. In a ship, there’s only one captain. Such affirmation is something that we tend to forget. Authority is not a very popular value these days. It is still necessary nonetheless. Someone has to decide. There must be someone in charge, asessing the risks, analysing and drawing conclusions, and then, finally, deciding.

That doesn’t mean that he (or she) is the only one to think. That would be a great loss of value, rationality, thinking capacity, a loss of options. Empowerment is still essential (and compatible), as it is dissent. But there’s a limit to it. And when the captain decides, the others must follow.

Have you ever felt that, in a project or a workgroup, the problem was that the decisions were not actually being made? Or being enforced? Have you ever felt that authority was missing? That indecision and ambiguity was undermining the whole execution? That’s when a good methodology for making decisions is needed.

There’s a time when every task becomes critical: just give it enough wandering time and you’ll see. IT comes a time when further procrastination is no longer possible. That’s when a chieftain is needed.

Vista has not accomplished its expectations. Albeit more than 140 million copies sold, that only represents around 13% of the installed base. And if you take into account that Vista has been around since november 2006 and an average lifespan of five years for any computer, only because of natural growth that figure should be around 20%. What’s happening?

When a company has such a great market share as Microsoft, and a killer and omnipresent product like Windows, it wouldn’t be fair to say that those figures mean trouble. Not really, only unfulfiled expectations, that’s all.

But users are not massively upgrading to Vista. Many prefer their new computers with XP (and still get counted as new Vista licensees) because it’s simpler, faster, and you already know your way around. I myself like the aqua, sorry aero, look in Vista, but still struggle to find my way to simple things. I’d rather use a simpler system: I get tired of so many questions and confirmations and having to navigate tortuous paths.

Simplicity gets its reward in speed. Ask any Linux geek and he will tell you how he manages without lots of small utilities incorporated in your software that you use daily. The good thing is that he also manages without hundreds of utilities that you seldom or never use, and without hundreds more that you never knew they existed and, if you ever had needed them, you wouldn’t have even sought. (Do you really know how to insert an horisontal line in Microsoft Word or how to query an ODBC source in Windows?)

Then, there’s us, people that use MacOS. A sometimes despised and bashed minority (around 3%) that happens to be growing above average with a dangerous tendency to be self-conscious. In a mass consumption society, isn’t it great to be special in something? More stable than Windows, more usable, a better user experience (yes, that is completely subjective, but believe me in this one) but still not bomb-proof in its latest version: Leopard. And more visible than ever because of iPods, iPhones and, of course, the incumbent’s spoofs.

But, following the initial reasoning, which are the strategies behind the operating systems? Which should be next move? Apple has recently uncovered a few words about their new version of MacOS: from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Doesn’t sound very different, does it? What’s behind it and why is it important? It’s not easy to deny that Apple knows a lot about emerging trends that tend to be imitated by the rest of the market.

I’ve drawn the following model thinking about operating systems in two axis:

• on the horizontal axis the sophistication of the operating system, measured in terms of “eye candy”, as it is easy to observe and doesn’t focus on the utility of that eye candy (that would increase the analysis’ complexity and introduce a lot of interpretation), but it’s obviously correlated with the utilities offered to the user.
• on the vertical axis is the complexity and size of the code what counts: the system weight.

First of all, the dangerous zone is on the top level: heavy systems. Heavy systems tend to be unstable, usually because they build on foundations laid out many years ago by legacy systems that don’t exist anymore but that they need to preserve. This is the case increasingly both by Windows and MacOS: the first because it has compatibility with a sheer list of devices and still with good old MSDOS, the second because, albeit being much more selective with hardware, still hasn’t recovered from the trauma of having two very distinct CPU platforms: the PowerPC and the Intel platform. Vista still is far higher in this classifications making a very heavy system, to the point that requires the latest hardware to fully function while still being compatible with everything else. That’s why many prefer XP.

The massive side for an operating system is not that good either. XP was clearly short of functionality, while with Vista the effort has been made to try to compensate, but jumping too far away, adding cumbersomeness to the menu. Vista is only a street away of being annoying, and that’s another reason to still prefer XP. In any case it’s also a proof that with XP you’re going to miss things too.

MacOS stays in a comfortable middle position. Still, Leopard increased functionality and usability, as well as eye-candy, but paying a price for it: increased system sophistication and weight. That means, of course, instability issues.

Linux users sit in a comfortable corner table: a simpler system that is lighter than anything else, with good and bad consequences.

Where is the future going to be?

This is the part that is supposed to be explained in Nostradamus’ prophecies, but I think I have a clue to offer. Many Vista users are still downgrading to XP, and there must be a reason for that: the seeking of simplicity. We need more stable operating systems, not nicer ones. Don’t get me wrong, we like eye candy, but we are ready to trade some off in exchange for better performance. Windows should aim back, somewhere in between Vista and XP, going down in the stability road… and down the chart back to the safe green zone, still losing some screens and complexity in its way.

That’s what Snow Leopard is all about. The same animal, only changed by a couple of colours, but ready to live in a much hostile environment. Trimming the OS, making it more hardware selective, only optimised for the newest hardware platforms. No human-machine interface overhaul but a lot of kernel and essential applications rewriting. That’s, in my humble opinion, the way to go. And the way Microsoft should follow too.

Because, when with a laptop, energy consumption depends on CPU consumption, and thus in the cleanliness of the code, and the megabytes taken by programs to run. After all, those bytes need to be read from the hard disk, paged in and out of the memory, and can potentially make your computer run out of fuel faster.

Taken from Roughly Drafted, a web you cannot miss if you want to know more about Apple, this is what the apple folks have been doing to the Snow Leopard basic programs:

Interesting backoffice work, don’t you think?

Star Trek is not the encyclopedia of life. Even though it contains so many interesting ideas about leadership and management, with different styles depending on the series, that is worth knowing about.

One of the scenarios that is a reference in the Star Trek world is the Kobayashi Maru scenario, which is a “lose-lose” or “no-win” scenario. Regardless of what you do, you’re doomed. We can see this kind of scenarios in everyday life: from organisations that have a couple of conflicting objectives to pursue at all costs, pyrrhic victories or military victories that are so costly to win that are not worth-it (ring a bell?), or the kinked curve of demand for oligopolies, that can only begin competing between itselves bearing huge losses. Even the Spanish Inquisition’s confessions were like that: torture until pleaded guilty and then executed: every move made it worse.

The original Kobayashi Maru scenario was a test for Star Trek commanders. In the simulator they received a distress call: a ship had been stranded on the other side of the border. They were subsequently faced with the decision of whether or not entering into enemy zone, underpowered, to try to rescue the crew of the Kobayashi Maru.

There was no escape, the only option was not to try the rescue.

One briskly student devised a  solution: cheating. Cadet Kirk did in his third attempt. Strangely enough, tweaking the simulator was considered original thinking. Probably that was only because it had not been attempted before. In time Cadet Kirk became the infamous Captain Kirk.

Sometimes, regardless of what you do, defeat is unavoidable.

Yes, I’m exagerating a little, but this has been a hell of a Kobashi Maru week. And to you all there that have Kobayashi Maru weeks once in a while, there’s still a message of hope. The Kobayashi Maru scenario had a meaning and purpose.

Because it wasn’t an intelligence or ability test. It was a character test. How do we face odds and specifically unsurmuntable odds? After all managing death is a way to learn to manage life.

Paraphrasing another Star Trek classic, Mr. Spock, “fear is the mind killer”. Sometimes the worst might simply happen, and what’s important then is how to handle the situation, how to keep your own control and integrity under adverse or inauspicious circumstances.

Making the most out of it. That’s how you learn to be better, and how to bounce back and subdue the next possibly conquerable odd. Don’t let circumstances drag you down, because you need to keep fit for the next, possibly unforseeable, challenge. And it may well be one you can cope with.

The exam was really stressful. More than three hours writing like crazy. At the end I was rather confused, not really sure of what to expect. Fortunately, it was over.

I sat the exam at Barcelona’s British Council. I thought it would be a better experience than taking a plane and driving to Henley. It was a good idea. The place is just ten minutes from home.

On the other hand it was rather weird to be the only one taking the exam. The invigilator was there only for me. At least he was nice and had a thick book to read so he didn’t spend three hours glancing at me in suspicion. That would have been awkward.

Half full or half empty, who knows. I hope I pass. In the meantime I just need some time to relax. And that’s what I did on the weekend. The garden needed my attention so I just focused on trimming the bushes and getting tired. Oh my, my arms got so bruised!

The view from home is rather relaxing. The weather wasn’t perfect. It was the fourth rainy weekend after the most severe draught that I can recall. From scarcity to the most rainy May in 25 years. Our water reserves have tripled and reservoirs have reached 60% capacity. It looks like we’ll have enough water for the time being.

I like it when the beach is almost empty, and the showers scare the tourists. The calm seems to envelope everything, the air is fresher, the plants greener. This spring the plants are blooming like never before. Let’s forget about the price of oil, the high interest rates, the lack of liquidity and the forthcoming stagflation. It’s time to enjoy… at least for a while…

The garden this year is full of Mediterranean roses. The plants grow by the hour. A good omen? I hope so.

Yes, I admit it: I am nervous. Been there before, but I still feel the anxiety to sit an exam. Maybe I shouldn’t. I am supposed to be wiser, older (that’s for sure), more mature and self assured than before. But still I insist into getting myself into the verge of anxiousness again, clouded by emotions, cluttered by several contradicting feelings.

Because the whole spectrum of learning comes down to this, the whole personal development rhetoric melts and, what is left, is hard bone again, the same measurable and accountable bottom-line: exams.

Sadly, the whole learning experience converges and funnels to an exam. It all revolves around being tested, thoroughly or not, with a closed set of rules that deprecate initiative and enforce strict followership of rules.

After all that disquisition around soft and hard people management models, after all that rambling around the balanced scorecard, after acknowledging uncertainty and complexity, all the roads end here again, in a cold, specific and simple figure, the mark.

I wouldn’t want to practice the cynic or sceptic here. It’s simply that I am nervous. There must be a better way to assess people than the one I have experienced this year. I simply don’t feel it’s fair. A friend of mine just advised me not too read too much about the case: it could be counterproductive. Excuse me? Counterproductive trying to learn more? Since when? Yet I fear he’s right.

If I had to change one thing about the MBA it would be its assessments. I can’t agree with certain doctor at Henley that decided to judge me by her obscure set of rules instead of listening to me and being fair. But not being British has this things, and you learn to live with a cultural gap. Where would be the international experience if everything was just like at home?

Yet another day less in this countdown to Wednesday…

As the average reader of this blog knows, and wordpress knows such individuals exist to my amazement (THANK-YOU), I do several things in my job, one of them is the integration of the baggagge system in the Terminal South (or Terminal D) in Barcelona’s airport.

Well, it used to be one of them… but it has been growing and growing, absorbing my time and effort, sometimes with complex things, of course, but very often with little and silly things, sometimes simply to overcome the lack of communications between parts in a huge project, sometimes just repeating the same things again and again.

Organisations prepare themselves to manage projects. They start shyly with one and, if they are able to envisage an strategy, they include project management into their capabilities. There are models to describe how project management competencies are integrated into organisational capabilities. Different organisations are at different levels, and thus are able not only to manage projects but also to increasingly learn from them.

But, at the end of the day, panic happens. That’s when they forget everything and start to triple-check everything based on the gut feelings of people, high enough in the ladder, that don’t really know about the systems to be implemented. Trivial things get inflated and strategic things suddenly obviated.

That’s what has happened to me with the Terminal 5 syndrome (to know more about Heathrow’s Terminal 5 click here). It will take some time to settle. In the meantime some issues have been enshrined as the most relevant by the organisation and are draining a lot of resources. Yes, organisations are able to learn a lot about project management but, when panic starts, they sort of regress to a previous state, top level managers want to micromanage what they still don’t know anything about, and reality gets distorted to adapt to the top management expectations.

A hard critique? Fortunately the tide is just a tide and we will be able to focus the existing energies on the real issues… having top management’s attention is very helpful as long you can manage it in the right direction, and to help you instead of interfering.

When you think of building a terminal you always think of huge construction works. And yes, that’s the bulk of the budget, and sometimes the most spectacular part. But in a 80/20 rule fashion, that 20% ends up entailing 80% of the work. As I like to say, the devil is in the details.

For example, in Barcelona’s airport, we started 2006 doing something like this:

The horizontal axis is roughly equivalent to one mile. The South Terminal was beginning to take shape. It was still divided into several parts instead of being a single building. That’s the way it was decided in the tendering process: there should be a few smaller cakes instead of a big one. A dilemma between having to co-ordinate or letting more companies participate. It was decided towards the latter… no wonder co-ordinating has been one of the main issues here.

But three years later, with the building almost done, we are focusing on a lot of different and much smaller things. Things like the following:

The white structure you see is inserted to the glass block. The purpose of the structure is to hold a couple of flat screens to be able to inform the passengers for the boarding process. It is thus provided by a different company than the one that is building the green glass block, the one that is providing the energy, the one that is providing the communications (that the screen will surely need in order to work), and the one that is providing things such as the air bridge or the cooling systems.

Yes, it’s all about interference again. In this case, as we get closer to the endgame, the different paths start to converge into one set of critical paths, all interrelated with each other. There’s no more unique critical path, but every single path becomes dependent on the others’ every delay: a web of interdependencies, a critical network instead of a path. 

My impression is that this part is much trickier than the other one. Finishing something is much more difficult than just going along with it. Slack has been consumed: the endpoint is not far anymore, pressure is increasing, hysteria is hovering, and we have to go down to every detail.

And studying for the final exam doesn’t help. In fact I sometimes arrive so tired that I don’t have the will to do anything. Still I have to. I strive to find some free time whenever, sometimes eating a quick sandwich and hurrying to imitate the waiting passengers in any available coach. The only difference is that they are waiting for something, just passing the time. I, on the other hand, I’m trying to use it. My macbook comes with me wherever I go, preview -for PDFs- and powerpoint to take notes always ready.

It’s funny how the process here is the other way around. When I studied the people, processes and financial modules, it was a matter of going into detail, of submerging into a wealth of information and trying to find the details, the reflections, the hidden wisdom, sometimes simply the stories behind, the assumptions, the reasoning. In fact that was a mistake because my teachers didn’t want me to prove that in the assignments: they just wanted to test that I knew the basic models. And I paid a price for going too far.

Now I’m going back to the basics. An exam is a place where you have to prove that you understand the basic reasoning, its assumptions, and apply it to some cases. It’s something like the terminal, but backwards, from detail to widely accepted models. That’s what they expect from me, and that’s what I should be giving them… I’ll try to refrain myself from doing otherwise.

It’s been too long without blogging. Some weeks at an hectic pace. Good things, bum things and a grain of salt. In this learning journey I don’t especially like posting about me. But here I am again, the worst draught we have ever suffered in Barcelona and I am at the beach and it’s raining! A few days ago I was in rainy England reflecting, trying to finish my assignment -dismissed as too reflective by the way-. Can it be that I’ve started to believe my own lies? Do people really expect you to reflect or talking about reflection in personal development is paying lip service to a new god while still worshipping the old one? Who knows.

I don’t want to further bore you with my own ramblings. The thing is that, if you ever face finance, think about the bottom line! There’s absolutely nothing else. No corporate social responsibility, no carbon footprint, just budgets, margins and ratios. The stake-holders are simply unavoidable, and the customers necessary. And if they care about those things, we’ll have to convince them that we care too. Nothing more.

My macbook just took this picture of me. I know I should have moved to avoid the direct light from behind, but I thought I could put something natural and improvised here. And that’s what I did. It’s raining outside. The fireplace is the only heat around, and the air is a bit smoky. Huge waves from the storm are splashing on the beach a few metres from here. Some dogs are howling while mine lay wet on the floor next to me. The recently established neighbouring bees are completely quiet inside their hive: they do not dare to go out. Next picture I’ll try to show you more of this. But not today.

The blog has just surpassed its 30.000 visits. Not bad, huh? Fairly surprising in fact. I’m still amazed that people find these pages floating in this coarse soup that the internet is. Maybe that’s why I decided to show my face and my nonsense, all at once.

What else happened these days? Another workshop, and, seeing the big picture, I’m straightly headed for the final exam. The first year will soon be gone. But first I need to study, I need to pass the exam.  And another year will be gone, one year and a half of blogging, and I will still be here.

Sorry for the babbling. That’s what I felt like doing today. That’s what my 3.5G modem is for. And thanks for reading.

Last Sunday my doggie decided to jump on my MacBook. Doggies have the ability to change from a quiet and relaxed mood to an excessive joy in a matter of seconds. I can’t describe the sensation I had seeing my middle-to-large sized beloved dog on my highly-priced adored computer. But she did.

Guess what happened? The computer withstood valiantly the assault. The momentum wasn’t able to join forces with gravity. It never fell down. But one of the keys jumped in revenge and tried to catch the doggie. Utterly broken, there was no way to reattach it.

A broken key. I felt like possessed by a sudden illness. Now it was my time to change into a gloomy mood.

The worst thing a patient can do is try to impersonate a doctor and use the world-wide-vademecum, that’s the internet and its information about hundreds of patients that have gone through the same illness. Why is that that the bad experiences get blogged far more often?

I encountered dozens of stories about broken keyboards, computers kidnapped at the technical service for weeks or even months, and then returned scratched to their unfortunate proprietors, about huge repair bills, bad and worse experiences, voided guarantees or even frauds.

So my mood went from gloomy to desperately depressive, collecting the dismal, dreary and dispiriting tonalities all in one.

I even tried to investigate how to solve the problem. I found a couple of websites that sold individual keys. That was the first good news. The bad news was that the gone-missing key is not standard but from the Spanish keyboard. My computer is in English but of course with a Spanish keyboard: I need a few more symbols to be able to write Spanish or Catalan.

The missing key was the one with both the symbols < and >. The English (both American and European) keyboards, have those symbols in two separate keys. That meant that they probably didn’t have my key in stock. The cost wasn’t that important, but the expected delay was significant. What should I do?

Well. Monday came and I went to the nearest Apple service centre in Barcelona. Only 300m from home there is that nice place… Microgestio. Let me tell you about my experience with them.

There were no queues. Just a nice couple at the counter. They called a technician that was with me in a matter of seconds. Then he left with my hapless computer. And I was there left waiting… I felt naked… it felt like a long wait… but it was only for a couple of minutes. Then he came back. The key was there. Everything was covered, no questions asked. Just a nice, emphatic smile. Just what I needed: no delays, no retreats, only an efficient solution.

That was like a moment of truth, a defining moment. I enjoyed and experimented good service… a rare and elusive taste. For Apple it was a small expense: the cost of a key. But what they got in return was loyalty. Immediate pay-back, and a greater, by far, net present value.

One key for another apostle. Is there a better deal?