Category Archives: in english

in english

When will Latin American governments get it?

As said in some of my previous posts, I was at the Creativity World Forum in Ghent this week and I was really surprised by one thing, but let’s start from the beginning.

The event itself was organised by the self-proclaimed Districts of Creativity, an association of what I can only term regions-state borrowing from Kenichi Ohmae’s term. These districts of creativity include Flanders (Belgium), Qingdao (China), Shanghai (China), Lombardy (Italy), Nord-Pas de Calais (France), Karnataka (India), Maryland (USA), Baden-Württemberg (Germany), Rhône-Alps (France), Catalonia (Spain), Scotland (UK) and Québec (Canada).

I was at the Karnataka booth (Bangalore, the IT capital of India is in this state) and I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the government representatives there. Regardless of the fact that I am a student and I don’t have anything to bring to their country they really explained to me what are they all about and invited me to come. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the attitude prevalent in most of Latin America that Foreign Direct Investment is the devil and we are so much better without it, and how the Indians really try to attract as much as they can but not only stay at the lower end of, in this case, software production, but keep on repeating their matra of “moving up the value chain” (no pun intended).

When will our governments start doing that?

in english

Séléction Féderale

You can see that Belgium is quite a dividied country when the newscasters here don’t talk about the football national team, they talk about the football federal team. They say that Belgians are only united around the football team, the king and the flag, and I’m really starting to see that it’s (almost/mostly/???) true. Interesting.

in english

Veracruz 1-2 Chivas

The Mexican football league follows a very strange system for those that follow European competitions. It has two tournaments per year (Apertura during the fall and Clausura in spring) and a system of league followed by playoffs. 18 teams are divided in three groups based on last year’s performance out of which the top 2 qualify to the quarterfinals, and another 4 teams to a preliminary play-off round. If you don’t get it, don’t worry, neither did I when I was a kid…

Why is this important? Because Chivas did qualify to the preliminary play-off phase, and played on wednesday against Veracruz, beating them 1-2. Tonight the “holy flock” plays at home, and we hope to get to the quarters. It would be very important for the team and the fans to win the league given that we haven’t won in 9 years, we’re still the team with the most titles in the league, and this year is our 100th anniversary (we had big celebrations in May).

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with wednesday’s goals and I hope I wake up a happy man tomorrow morning.

in english

FU Business School

I was talking with a guy who runs a biotech start up I met at the Creativity World Forum about the fact that he feels that he hasn’t heard enough in business literature and training about the failed cases in business, meaning all the companies that for some reason or another failed, and why. That’s why I propose the creation of a new paradigm in business education:

The Fuck Up Business School

At the FUB you don’t learn how to be an efficient business leader, you learn how to be an inefficient one. You study all the mistakes that previous companies have made so that you can innovate and make new ones. After all, trial and error is the best way to learn, so why don’t we leave the error part to previous attempts? 😉

in english

Creativity World Forum in Ghent, Belgium

This week I had the opportunity to attend the Creativity World Forum in Ghent, basically mentioning how regional governments, enterprises and individals can compete and benefit in the so-called creative economy. The event was comprised of two days of conferences and workshops, with some cocktails and extensive networking thrown in between as it happens in this kind of events.

Generally I can say that I was inspired by the congress, but there is still left one nagging feeling that the word “World” is slightly too pretentious in the name, given that there was nobody from two continents (South America and Africa) and the vast majority of the participants were Belgians from Flanders. However, I believe that it was a very good initaitive by the local government and it’s interesting to see the already the rise of the region-state that had been predicted by Thomas L. Friedman and Kenichi Ohmae.

in english

Addicted to languages

4 Comments

I have to say that I’m really glad that I have a TV in Brussels, even though in the beginning I was very reluctant. The reason is simple: except for Finnish, Portuguese and Spanish-language channels, in my (very small) TV I have plenty of channels in French, English, Dutch, German and Italian, which means that I can practise those languages in the comfort of my home.

It’s not that I speak any of them perfectly (there is no such thing anyway), but I really like the different doors they open, different ways of thinking and so on. As my old German texbook name said, they’re bridges between peoples.

The most fascinating thing is that there’s still so many to learn. I’d like to study Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Náhuatl, Yucatecan Maya…

So much to learn, so little time…

in english

When beach or city holidays are not enough

I read an article in the newspaper about trends in the tourist industry that made me think. Now there are tours on offer to see the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Ground Zero in New York, the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in Lousiana or the tsunamis in Thailand, and even an “illegal immigrant tour” in central Mexico where the tourist pays to feel how it is to cross the border through the desert guided by people who have done it.

Is it that we want to empathise with people who are less fortunate, or only that lives in the rich parts of the planet are just too boring?

en español, in english

Aterciopelados

Another post in the series of “Rock en Español”.

Aterciopelados is a band from Colombia who has enjoyed success accross Latin America for the past 15 years. As is the trend for Rock en Español acts, they fuse Colombian music with rock and hip hop to astounding success. They have even been nominated by TIME as one of the 10 best bands in the world, and the same magazine has also just published a review of their latest album, “Oye”.

Below some videos.

Bolero Falaz (El Dorado, 1994)
Florecita Rockera (El Dorado, 1994)
El Estuche (Caribe Atómico, 1998)
Maligno (Caribe Atómico, 1998)
El Álbum (Gozo Poderoso, 2000)
Luz Azul (Gozo Poderoso, 2000)

More information from Wikipedia or the Official Site.

in english

The news you see determine your reality

I’ve noticed something very interesting during my trips around the world, and that’s summarised in how I decided to title this post. Even though we have become more “globalised” there is no single news source (to the dismay of CNN, BBC News, Euronews, Al-Jazeera and all the others I’m forgetting). Some examples below:

  • In the U.S. newscasts tend to be of a local, state or national nature, and international news tend to be about Iraq, Afghanistan or any other perceived security threat. Seldom do you hear anything about their neighbours (Canada & Mexico) unless there is a problem. Almost never do you hear about Europe.
  • In the UK the news are mostly local or national, but they tend to report quite a bit on both Europe, the U.S. and the security crises of the day.
  • In Brazil, they’re mostly national, about the neighbouring countries (Argentina, Venezuela, etc.), the U.S. or Europe.
  • In Japan, they’re mostly about Japan (at all different levels), the U.S., China or Korea.
  • In Finland they talk mostly about local news, national news, what happens in Europe, the U.S., Sweden and Russia.
  • In Mexico they spend their time talking about national politics, security and local news. The international news section is brief but usually quite varied, although there is a big focus on news items about the U.S. anyway.

It is very interesting to see that even though we live in a time when world wide information truly is at our fingertips, we tend to receive very little of it if we don’t search for it ourselves, and the differences in perspective are absolute startling. That’s what it’s all about, of course.