MONEYBALL GUARDIOLA

Ideas start with ourselves. In sports, being familiar with or knowing the playfield has been debated to a great extend about how this made a difference to obtain a competitive advantage over the local team.

At the same time, this has had to do with the kind of grass and the size of the field. But at the end all teams obtained the same victory rate playing at home.

The question lies in not having found a real differentiating factor that could give any team a competitive advantage over its adversaries, beyond the advantage of playing at home.

The quality of the team counts and a bigger budget can attract more talent and, therefore, more victories.

Then, am I just saying that the team with more resources is the one able to attract more talent and therefore capable of improving its victory rate? Or, on the other hand, a team on a lower budget will never be able to get a talented and competitive team on low wages?

To both questions the answer is no. As the film Moneyball points out, it’s about breaking the rules.

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TEARS IN RAIN

 

“I´ve seen things you people wouldn´t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die”.

These were the wonderful las words by Batty (Rutger Hauer), Nexus 7 replicant in Blade Runner. A film, boldly ahead of our time, which sets up different questions that probably the future will answer: how genetic engineering and AI produce artificial humans (replicants) for tough and dangerous tasks, but also taking human sides into account, as Batty exposes in his monologue (tears in rain).

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IDEAS HAVING SEX

 

This post title comes from a sentence by Matt Ridley, a British journalist, businessman and author of popular science books with a very strong scientific background, who when pointing this idea out was making a word game which is easy to accept. Yes, ideas have intercourse taking into consideration that an idea is a combination of several ideas.

Tinder combines match.com with a smartphone. Pizza Hut melts Mc Donald’s and pizza. Mc Donald’s takes hamburgers through a production chain. There would be a wide number of success cases and all of them have in common the conjunction of different ideas.

tinder1

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ECONOMIC POLARIZATION AS AN OPPORTUNITY

Extreme markets segments era

Market polarization as a trend is not new. On the contrary, it has been going on for the last years. What it is happening, maybe, due to fast changes taking place, is that has been unnoticed for some, while for others has become something normality.

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LOST GENERATIONS?

Economic growth models always go through cyclic and anticyclic processes. Somehow, it is like test they take and results will depend upon their stability and resistance.

In any case, manpower takes most of the damage while these processes are on and consequences are usually devastating. Unemployment increases and a part of the population is put aside because it has specialized in an obsolete model that will never come back. This population group must reinvent itself.

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WORLD ECONOMY IN 2020

 

Oil as a decisive factor 2016-2020

Oil has gone down to its minimum historical rank within the last decade, the barrel was below 30 USD. Now is at 50 USD. In June 2014 it was at 115 USD.

Beyond geopolitical issues that might have influenced this current situation, there are other aspects to take into account. The increase of oil supply -even higher due to Iran becoming a stakeholder again; low demand, due to China’s crisis; and USA’s reserves, are responsible for this situation.

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ACURIO AND OLIVER: MOVEMENT AND CHANGE

Both of them, with different goals but with a common artistic gift for gastronomy, have made a revolution.  One has contributed to create a brand: Peru. The other has spread a healthier food style transforming cooking into a lever with a social effect. In both cases, technology, innovation and education are the columns in which their movements are built on.

GASTÓN ACURIO FOTO

Gastón Acurio

JAMES OLIVER FOTO

Jamie Oliver

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TOWARDS A NEW ECONOMIC AND PRODUCTIVE MODEL

A new citizen, sophisticated and demanding

In one of the last posts, technology was spotted as a driver for social, economic, political, legal and environmental change.

Technology, as a tool to improve efficiency and competitiveness, can be regarded as an economic lever, responsible for 25% of GDP growth.

Avoiding to adapt to this new reality is not, therefore, an option. Due to its huge impact, the outcome is that citizen, client or consumer, becomes the center of everything instead of the product.

Current citizen’s profile has evolved in different areas in how she/he communicates, socializes or builds up an identity. This new citizen gets information through multichannel platforms, assuming a key role in debates and having an opinion about matters in which he/she might be interested. Her/his voice, amplified and critical, demands quick and quality answers, in a more sophisticated way.

This new situation rises a challenge as a new paradigm: the business management of the citizen in his/her role as client in the technological environment.

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TOMORROW´S WORLD

I DO NOT LIKE THE TERM “ENTREPRENEUR “ NOR THE ADJECTIVE “DISRUPTIVE” . NOT BECAUSE THEY ENJOY SENSE AND RELEVANCE BUT BECAUSE, INTO FASHION, ITS ESSENCE IS BLURRED.

MORE CLEAR, STRAIGHTFORWARD AND CONSISTENT WITH THE TIMES WE LIVE IN TODAY AND, ABOVE ALL, THAT THOSE WHO COME TO US, WE HAVE ANOTHER SERIES OF QUALIFIERS SUCH AS “ADVENTUROUS”, “CREATOR”, “INCLUSIVE”, “PASSIONATE” AND “MAVERICK” WHO HAVE TO TAKE CENTER STAGE, ALONG WITH THE ABILITY TO SACRIFICE AND SPIRIT OF OVERCOMING.

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INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS

Analysing competitiveness key factors becomes essential to successfully tackle the present and future economic environment. This has been so far the goal pursued in several previous articles in this blog.

The most relevant factor to take into consideration in order to become competitive and play the field in big markets was a complex operation.

Coming up with it involved dissecting the list of countries by R+D investment rating and establishing a difference between this indicator and the set of variables that determine the innovative character of a country.

This factor will conclude, in terms of international competitive relevance, which countries lie at the forefront of international influence and which must face difficulties and limitations for being placed right behind or even farther.

So, taking these elements into consideration, current global economic power epicentre is being moved towards the East by new prominent areas specialized in trading goods, along with countries from other parts of the world like the USA.

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