THE OLD FORTUNES: In this list there are not many young fortunes in the style of the American or Chinese fortunes. I find this worrisome, since being old fortunes, what they are looking for is safety for their assets. Something that I understand as damaging for the country’s economy, in general terms. Nevertheless we could use as examples the young fortunes of Amancio Ortega of Inditex with 28,283 million and that of Isaak Andik of Mango with roughly 3,000 million, and that’s not bad. It also shows where our economy is heading, unfortunately, and it is not heading to companies with new and innovative technologies. This does not mean that these fortunes do not invest and develop these businesses, but rather that their underlying fortunes do not come from these. In the future I would like to see in this list a Millennial with a fortune that has started from zero whose origin is not in entertainment or sports.  Although since we have seen the building blocks, these are the buildings that we will get. And in the end, money is money. In fact, even in the Forbes list there are cases of this: many of these fortunes are grouped by families, given the complexity of figuring out the individual assets of each member, and this is even more common in fortunes mature in their origin.

THE LOTTERY: I couldn’t find in this list, although I think she should be there, that lucky woman from Majorca who in 2009 pocketed 125 million euros, IN CASH !!!, the biggest lottery winnings in Spain. According to my calculations, if she had been well advised, her fortune could now be almost 180 million euros or more if she has bought real estate and applies the valuations that our honorable financial companies apply to these investments. In England, it seems that they are less strict with this type of fortunes, and the English couple, the Weirds, who in 2011 won the biggest lottery prize in the history of Europe at some 185 million euros were included in position 420 of the Sunday Times Rich List, at the same level as the Beckhams.

Overall, the global figures from 2011 for the largest fortunes in Spain and the total amount that we spent in the Christmas lottery have not varied significantly from the previous year.

I don’t know, however, if this is a good or bad sign, since right now I do not see a correlation, unless it be that the Rajoy administration finally decides to eliminate the national deficit that is on its way by starting up the IPO of lotteries once again. In this case, many of the large fortunes included in the list, since they are risk-averse and seek safe investments, will line up to take advantage of the lottery, and many of them, since they are ancient themselves, will be matched up with an ancient game that in 2012 celebrates its bicentennial. Nevertheless, I hope and wish that they devote part of their fortune to promote newly created businesses.

In the end, what I am most sure of, is that being an entrepreneur which is not the same as being rich, it is better to play the lottery, since as my grandmother used to say:

“TO GET POOR OR GET RICH IN ONE DAY IS A MIRACLE OF THE HOLY LOTTERY!!!”

©Felipe Santiago

In the national recruiting market, intermediaries are appearing who use the social networks to offer specialized services in the publication of employment offers or in the search for talent, thanks to the current window that brings us other markets, especially the USA. They call these services 2.0. It also helps that the Spanish marketplace of employment offers has been taken over recently by INFOJOBS, and that, except for specific multi-nationals, these advances have displaced the companies. In the end it doesn’t help the crisis either.

In this business we have in Spain, for example, JOB & Talent, SN Talent and WISERI, among others. Each one has an income model more or less distinct, but each seeks a niche as a new channel for putting companies and individuals into contact with each other. I myself do not like to say candidates. These intermediaries use this new window supplied by the social networks to seek their market niche, by means of a more or less “technological” variant. In the end they don’t bring to Spain what they’ve been doing for years in the USA and the UK, and they use tools that in those markets have been created around the social networks.

As the director of a headhunting and staff selection company, (GD Human Capital), I view all these movements with satisfaction for being a better way of tightening and facilitating the communication between supply and demand of employment. It’s true, the headhunter must adapt to this situation and take advantage of it for the benefit of his clients. Now, in a quickly growing market, where we have various platforms with which to make an employment offer to our target market, we are more valuable as experts, in a different but stronger way.

In this universe of social networks we have a pure player in LINKEDIN, which has focused on this market exclusively by marketing various access account options for doing professional profile searches, going from marketing employment offers that display customized profiles to offering their star product, the RECRUITER tool. We save time using it, and both I myself as well as my team love it.

Google+ has yet to engage, so I won’t analyze it for now. Twitter is good for specific profiles and for making viral employment offers, strategic backup, see for example TWEET MY JOB. However, the one that is a world of opportunities for me is FACEBOOK and its world of specialized apps on recruiting launched in the USA and the UK. My favorite is BRANCH OUT, for now, a variation of Linkedin over FACEBOOK.

From here we go to WORK4US like the previous, BRAVE NEW TALENT, as the most focused social network, which in principle solved something lacking in LINKEDIN, TOP PROSPECT, which standardized the reference of people that may fit an employment offer and pay for it, JIBE, which facilitates processing of your network contacts to find work at the company you wish.

Lastly, in this entire universe we cannot leave aside employment portals like MONSTER, unlike INFOJOBS, which has launched its own social network BE KNOWN on FACEBOOK, or the curious ESCAPE THE CITY, which offers employment in exotic places for people who are bored with their current jobs.  Within this huge mass of tools it is important to note the dashboards, for example ZIP RECRUITING, which facilitates the placement of employment offers on different portals. It still hasn’t appeared on the Spanish market, but it is useful to us for multi-country international searches, or the specialty in processing employment and recruitment offers taken to the cloud on ZOHOO. It’s an opportunity for beginning recruiters who cannot afford tools of their own, or customized ones or the most sophisticated version of TRIBEPAD. Also worth mentioning are the portals known as MASHup, which in Spain, due to the narrowness of the market, are still in development, INDEED, SIMPLED HIRED or TROVIT and those which, in my JOBILINK project, I hope have some play due to being a version of the semantic search they are now calling 3.0. We’ll see if I find an investor.

We’re in a new, passionate scene, where there is no clear road we’re all traveling together, and that I enjoy every day. THANKS TO EVERYONE AND I WISH YOU ALL A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

©FELIPE SANTIAGO – GD HUMAN CAPITAL

The previous may be somewhat theoretical. Being pragmatic and grounded, I prefer to offer some examples of what seem to me to be innovative examples to follow, and which do not necessarily cause big headlines:

Such is the case of Pedro Delgado and his company Aquaphitex, S.L., for its uniqueness and, in how a person without any formal degree applies a series of scientific investigations and converts them into a solution, and ultimately a company, that generates employment. I recommend watching the video on his web site, in which he explains his project/innovation. His company is the first in Spain to be dedicated exclusively to the specialized production of macrophyte plants for phyto-purification of waste water. The plants have a geomembrane system, that injects oxygen into water while simultaneously purifying it. Thus, besides purifying the water, it also regenerates it, but produces no odors and leaves very little waste. . (Note: Very admirable)

The case of the foreign London School of Business & Finance and its innovative way of making a service more useful. How? By guaranteeing a job after their training program has been completed. It seems so simple, but no business school does it. They have professional career services, but they never guarantee you a job. With the simple innovation of changing the final part of a service, i.e., how it is applied, they guarantee the objective of all users who choose to take a post-graduate course. They apply it to their Programas Trium (Note: this is a bold challenge to business schools in Spain.

Another simple case could be Daniel Jorda and his company Panes Creativos or as a neighborhood bakery seeing its business declining transforms itself into a bakery that, by applying innovation and tradition to the creation of something as simple as bread, first comes up with a unique product that the major chefs of Spain acquire, then later creates a service allowing every restaurant owner to think his bread is special, that it goes better with his kitchen, all that leading to an increase in customers that both steps produced for him in his old business. (Note: I recommend that you try it and you’ll understand why.)

Another, would be the case of the taxi driver of Oviedo (Spain) Rixar Garcia and his way of innovating by mixing something as physical as the transportation of passengers by taxi with Twitter“@taxioviedo” plus Foursquare http://taxioviedo.blogspot.com/2010/09/como-lograr-en-72-horas-que-medio.html, which has allowed him to improve his job level and the profitability of his business as well as become known for his innovative idea. (Note: Let’s see what new idea he brings us from his trip to the USA.)

In conclusion, innovation is within reach of everyone, whether by extending the way a product or service meets a need or by creating a new one for the purpose. All you need to do is think about it and decide to do it.

©Felipe Santiago

DIFFERENTIATED SOLUTION: In order to triumph on the market it is no longer enough to think only about the product and the consumers’ needs. We must also be different. The best form to achieve a differentiated solution is to think of solutions that are complete due to the difficulty of implementing, sustaining and copying them. To this end it is necessary to find a differentiated solution that is complete, not only for one need but for the whole set of needs, from the most intimate, which are unknown even to the consumer himself, to those farthest from the main core. The more complete the solution the more different it is from the competitors. I am not selling a vaccination: I am selling a medical solution that includes the vaccination, the positive experience, the medical care and all its consequences: missing a day of work, insurance, logistics, etc. I am not selling an airplane ticket, but rather a transportation solution to get from one place to another.  I am not selling a newspaper but rather a culture and leisure solution.  I am not selling a screw, but rather a do-it-yourself solution.  I am not selling bread, I am selling a nourishment and health solution.

DIALOGUE: Communicating, informing and persuading the customer is not enough, if we already have a solution, the differential factor is to have a dialogue with our potential interlocutors: we are at the same level, we go one step beyond the promotion of communication and information. No one is in power: by engaging in dialogue, we promote understanding of the proposed solution.  The new technologies make this possible.

DISPONIBILITY: We have already moved past distribution channels and points of sale, etc. The hybrid purchase models, off-line and on-line have permitted us to move beyond the place and moment at which this ware/service can be acquired to the convenience of acquiring it when it is to the consumer’s/user’s advantage. Now we have to go one step further, we do not speak of a product/service or packages of these, now the challenge is to provide them with a solution. The higher the degree of complexity, the higher the profits and the differentiation.

DYNAMICS OF VALUES: I’m not interested in the price, we can manipulate it, predict it, vary it, maximize it, etc., in a fraction of a second. I’m not interested in the individual cost/benefit ratio of my business/project. I’m interested in the value generated by the solution for all participating agents, whether they are investors, employees, users, society, etc. We insert quantitative elements and non-quantitative elements into the equation. Every solution, if it really is a solution, has a value that can be measured, and the more value it adds as a whole, the more differentiated, and better, the solution.

©Felipe Santiago. Ideas on Management.

These required ingredients are very difficult to measure and their detection is based on the capacity of the headhunter to see them and to evaluate them based on their experience in multiple businesses and sectors, but once the technical knowledge necessary to be a CHIEF has been acquired, they are indispensable for forming part of this group.

I will make a list based on experience with clients and their demands. My recommendation is that if someone intends to enter as part of the group C, it would be a good idea to improve them and use them, independently of whether he aspires to be a Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer or any other C:

1. You must understand the company’s business, its strategy, the market in which it acts but above all its VALUE PROPOSITION in the new position.
2. You must have projective vision so that you perceive or envision FUTURE scenarios, you evaluate them and you make them probable.
3. You must be able to find opportunities and new lines of business, you must ADD VALUE continually: limiting yourself to manage the company’s available resources is not sufficient
4. You must tie your remuneration to the success and contributions that you make to your new company and position. You have to be continuously PROFITABLE. Past successes do not ensure future profitability, and hence if you are sure of yourself and the value that you provide, you should not hesitate to make variable retribution a priority.
5. You must be able to ADAPT and CHANGE each day of the week, while at the same time being SUSTAINABLE.
6. You must be QUICK: never, and today least of all, can we wait to make decisions. The best manager is the one who makes the right decision in the least possible time. By waiting to have more information you delay the achieving of objectives, and you will almost never have all the information.
7. You must be AVAILABLE, the environment, the ideas and the competition do not understand specific timetables.
8. You must be inclined to work in a COMMUNITY and not in a team. Not only in your company.  You are in a more ample economic environment composed of many individuals from direct interlocutors to others from different sectors, markets or positions, and you must interact with all of them.
9. You must be MODEST and a GOOD PERSON, with an open, tolerant, generous, decent and fair character. Personal blemishes in this regard make it difficult to fulfill ALL the previous points.

10.  Finally, you must be emotionally self-sufficient. PERSONAL MOTIVIATION is necessary for the continuous changes and the previous requirements. Each day is a new project.

A stock market that inspires fear, where large and small portfolios have lost everything that they recuperated since 2009,

A constitutional reform, carried out in a race and with the wolves at our heels, why would this be?

A Greek government that doesn’t know whether it will pay, even though it says it will, which makes those holding debt issued by our Autonomous Governments start to tremble, so as not to speak of those holding Greek debt,

A USA that has agreed to a debt ceiling, with a China that is preparing to strangle it financially, if the Americans don’t strangle themselves first, while the Americans will not force a dialogue on armies or on human rights,

A drop in growth in Germany and France that is going to produce red numbers, since the black ones are no longer in sight, with new failures to live up to predictions for growth in the PIB,

A return to the question the solvency of some financial entities, I do not think that they could have forgotten something so obvious, unless it is because they think that the individual economic agents have no memory or intelligence,

A nation that has more than 130 newspapers, something of an exaggeration without counting the television channels and radio stations, must be the country with the most and the best informed readers in the world. …Could this be the reason?

An unemployment rate that, whether we like it or not, is going to rise to close to 24%

A definitive legislative modification of the pensions by a law published secretly and with a confusing title.  Has anyone seen a reference, in these 130 newspapers, to the most important cutback in social rights in the last 20 years?

Certainly it would have been better not to have gone on vacation, because we are significantly worse than in July and time flies. With this panorama, one could become an “indignant”, but without getting too foggy-headed to be able to put into practice the following:

• Look for new opportunities. Forget about what you have done up to now and start over
• Don’t expect that anyone, anyone at all, especially the government will fix our economy or our businesses. It is each one of us who has to fix them.
• Prepare yourself to tackle the challenges to come. This hasn’t passed over yet, and it seems like it is going to get worse.
• Maintain liquidity, if you can, so that when you have what you are looking for in the first point you will not depend on anyone. Especially not on a financial company

A few years from now we will ask ourselves what we were doing in September 2011, and why we did not prevent it.

2. SERVICE AND MORE SERVICE.  Add layers of service to your offer. Think about giving value to your client instead of giving value to your offer. Enhance your offer and set yourself apart. Don’t let your client reduce your offer to a question of price. Don’t think of the client as a single being: the client is whoever buys from you, the client is whoever uses what you sell, the client is who administers what is purchased, the client is your client’s client. PROVIDE SERVICE TO ALL OF THEM.

3. PROXIMITY.  Reindustrialize once again in those businesses that require proximity. Invest in something that cannot be outsourced. Nearby you are indispensable, far away you can be substituted.

4. FIND OUT WHAT YOUR CLIENTS DO. You have to be a specialist in the client, not a specialist in the product.  You should be able to give an answer with your eyes closed to the question of what is your client’s line of business and who are your client’s clients. You are part of the value chain; don’t break it.

5. CHOICE.  The client likes to choose, give him an offer and an array of choices. Your competition does not do it. But do so in an intelligent way and inexpensively.

6. ELECTION OF YOUR MARKETING. The visionaries are on top, the missionaries are suffering, and the managers are in the middle. Choose a marketing strategy; be different and creative. Don’t do what is expected of your business. Surprise, but transmit your offer of value.

7. OPPORTUNITIES.  Adopt the attitude of “and what if he or she is right?”  It may be that the next opportunity comes from someone who offers an idea that you believe is incorrect. Don’t prejudge an idea by rejecting it, imagine that it can work in the right business. It could be that it is not the right, but it could be right with the addition of another idea that is also right.

8. SEARCH.  Put yourself in a position where you can find new ideas; relate to companies, persons and businesses different from your own. Look for inspiration in difference.

9. REFLECT.  Manage your time so as to find moments for reflection. Take advantage of this time to manage new visualizations for the problems posed by your business. Look for the roots of these problems. Visualize the future of your business.

10. SHARE.  Knowledge is everywhere, it is a transitory advantage, share it (sufficiently) with your organization and look for internal solutions. If you do not give, it will be hard to receive. Share with your clients too and learn from them.

Felipe Santiago

The reality is that without finding a solution for these three NO’s, it is going to be impossible for us to emerge from the crisis. It is the virtuous circle that maintains our system and that allows the creation of business and jobs.   

If the business model is not understood or if this model is not profitable, but is merely for subsistence, it is difficult to capture the attention of the investors who help it get started. Moreover, the entrepreneur must be conscious of his own valuable contribution to the market in which he will operate.  Why are they going to buy from him and not from someone else and until when?  This is the first step in constructing this virtuous circle, the creation of a breeding ground for ideas that allows for the creation of new business models that are sustainable and profitable. This first step entails more than just the technological models, since these, in themselves, will not solve the unemployment problem that we have in Spain, since their objectives are the elimination of human participation in the value chain. One example: I would center on developing business models in the tourism sector, which requires intensive hiring, and which, at present, reflects a year-on-year income growth rate of 4.6%.  

Source Bank of Spain

If there is no confidence, one of the bases of the economic system is destroyed: the multiplication of the money supply and the velocity of circulation of money, basic factors for the growth of the economy. If there is no confidence in the market nor in its agents, the market stops, nobody wants to exchange. The matter becomes more complicated if the investment in assets is reduced and the public expenditure is not productive, which is currently the case. The agents, from the government to the consumer, to businesses, labor unions and communication media must transmit confidence, without regard for their personal interests. Let’s focus on the good and not the bad in our economy, let’s focus on what we are able to do and not what we have done, and in so doing, we will create confidence in ourselves and we will generate confidence in our businesses.  

Source Bank of Spain

If there is no money – liquidity — even if the two previous conditions function, the circle does not close.  We must definitively resolve the matter of our financial system’s solvency, no matter what this entails, for as long as this does not happen there will be no liquidity. If there is no liquidity, there are no transactions, and if there are no transactions, then there are no jobs. As long as there is no credibility, the financial entities will not capture more resources with which to provide liquidity to the system, since the resources that they have are needed to finance themselves and to meet their own requirements and to finance the public administrations.  Why should we drain off more liquidity by helping certain moribund entities?  We must manage the mechanisms that inject liquidity into the market, thus freeing them up and not channeling them toward economic situations generated by political interests or the status quo.  

If this circle is closed, we will see unemployment drop since THERE IS UNDERSTANDING, THERE IS CONFIDENCE AND THERE IS MONEY.  

Felipe Santiago

I adopt this concept of analysis for two very timely reasons:

First due to the opening, yesterday, in USA of the film Too Big To Fail based on the book by Andrew Ross Sorkin  ’Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves’ which describes the situation that occurred in the USA during the financial crisis of 2008, with the disappearance and bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG.  The relationships that this situation created among politicians, among which we should pay special attention to the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, and the director of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and the rest of the financial institutions and power lobbies in Washington.
And secondly, due to Greece’s financial situation and the restructuring of its debt, which it was unable to handle except in the case of a severe adjustment plan that the Greek citizens themselves are not prepared to tolerate. This restructuring, if performed, could be considered by qualification agencies and by the markets as a suspension of payments on the part of the company, which would plunge the euro zone into a crisis with unforeseeable consequences from which it would be difficult to emerge.

Unfortunately this is the impression that the governments of different countries, especially Spain, give me, that those in the government, either consciously or unconsciously, leveraged in this strategy of too big to fail, which made them take measures that are unacceptable, and instead of correcting them they continued in this leverage of risk. We citizens, caught in this dynamic, cross our fingers, since this strategy used by those in our governments could have made us accomplices: the dynamic is too big not to affect us, and for this reason it is better to also push in this direction.

It is not necessary to go too far to find two very recent examples of this situation,

The first example comes from the change of government that will take place in different autonomous communities and city councils, which may or may not cause policies of budget joy adopted by some of the previous governments to spring up indiscriminately, or in clear language, policies of sweeping it under the rug and waiting to see who will clean up later, which is the first step to a situation where the deficit is so large that it cannot be handled, and for this reason, too large to be clearly stated. Too Big To Fail.

The second example comes from the financial entities and the marvelous FROB system. During the crisis, in parallel with the USA, Spain used the model Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) created by Hank Paulson and president Bush, launching a similar mechanism, the Fund for Ordered Bank Restructuring (FROB). At present this system does not work, the S&L’s and banks continue to have the same liquidity problems.  It abandoned solvency so that everyone can think what they see fit, until Basel III, the next stress tests and to the dates between September 30, 2011 and March 31, 2012 for them to do their homework. Given that this system does not work, in keeping with Too Big To Fail, the Royal Decree law 2/2011, from February 18 was conceived to reinforce the financial system, given that it is predicted that the new financial vehicles will not be able to capture sufficient money that would permit their survival, and the FROB is prepared for the acquisition of shares in these new financial entities that are not able to capture money on the market. Squaring the circle that we keep making bigger and bigger. Too Big To Fail.

As a response to the previous statements and if we grant that this concept of analysis is valid, it is we, the citizens, who must make those in the government understand that they made a mistake, that we are still in time if we do not make the monster that they created any larger, knowingly or unintentionally, but that it is present and that we do not have to make it bigger.

The model of generation of wealth has changed in its essence, and the models of political and economic concepts are still anchored in 19^th century movements of which the majority of citizens are unaware. What is clear is that we do not want to fail, even at the expense of being smaller.

Felipe Santiago

What determines a person’s capacity for a job is attitude and motivation: people who were tired already when they were born will continue to be that way, and people who have talent will still have it and develop it regardless of their age. The problem is that it is accepted, erroneously, that a professional career is a sprint, when in reality it is a long distance race that lasts more than 40 years, and professionals are not prepared for it, nor do they prepare themselves for it. An example of this would be the intensive pursuit of training at the beginning of the career in order to later live based on daily experience. WELL I DON’T AGREE. It has always been the case, and currently it is even more so, that the person who does not build upon his knowledge and explore useful application of his talent to the new environment is obsolete, and it is not a question of age but rather of attitude.

Now that we have arrived at this point, I would separate three concepts that evolve with the passing of the years but do not diminish the professional capacities: they must simply be adapted. A manager must realize that these three concepts are subject to change, and for this reason, he must adapt his long professional career to them by adapting his intelligence, developing his talent and achieving physical fitness.

First, intelligence, in the broader sense coined by Howard Gardner, who recently received the Prince of Asturias Prize in Social Sciences. Gardner’s sense establishes multiple intelligences: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, spiritual, existential and moral. Everyone has some one of these, and they can be stimulated in the course of life. Some of these develop with age and others diminish.

Next, talent, in the sense coined by Daniel Coyle of capacities that persons possess that are extraordinary with respect to other people. He operates under the assumption that these capacities can be trained, and hence, with good motivation, large doses of myelin and a good teacher one can become a talented person.

Lastly, physical fitness in the sense explained by Emilio Duro and his Optimism Quotient. Since it may be the case that we are not able to take care of ourselves, our physical fitness affects motivation, work and optimism.

Some examples of creators and gurus who were more than 50 years old prove this to us each day in the field of innovation and creativity:

Ferrán Adrià who gave courses at Harvard on the innovative use of cooking and foodstuffs in the fundamentals of physics and engineering.

Edward de Bono and lateral thinking, which enables creative decision-making and problem-solving outside the framework of more restricted traditional thinking.

Benjamín Zander and his Art of Possibility, according to which each of us creates our possibilities by continual questioning our orthodox, preconceived form of thinking.

There are more examples in the creation of large companies:

Ray Kroc of McDonalds, a blender salesman who knew nothing of the restaurant business and less about the fast food concept, who at the age of 52 impelled the McDonald brothers to construct one of the most successful businesses in the world.

Harlan David Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, who at the age of 65 created the embryo of another successful chain of restaurants with a social security check.

Without going into the cases of Kroc and Sanders, the objective is to eliminate the idea of age as an obstacle and plan your professional career without considering your employability to be diminished by it. We have to be able to eliminate the list of disadvantages mentioned in the study ‘Work after 50’, conducted by the Spanish Confederation of Seniors’ Organizations (CEOMA) due to which companies resist hiring members of this collective; “high wage costs”, “high costs of dismissal”, “resistance to change”, “inadequate training”, “lack of functional mobility”, “low motivation”, “low productivity”, “lack of geographic mobility”, “obstacle to promotion of their subordinates,” “loss of physical capacity” and “higher rate of absenteeism.”

For these reasons, I DO NOT AGREE that when a person is over 50 his professional career is over, ending one’s career or not depends on each individual. If the necessary steps are taken, it will never end, and this does not depend on a numerical classification such as age, but rather on the individual.

Felipe Santiago