Good Afternoon. I hope you are happy and enjoying this lovely Saturday. I am quite well despite my entrepreneur condition of super limited resources. Five years without revenues is horrendous. Particularly when I lost more than three years of my life as a jobless person, trying to find a corporate job as crazy and nothing worked out. I should have started my company immediately after the World Bank did not renew my contract in April 2012. I lost too much time doing job hunting. Anyway, past is past, and we can´t change the past, but we have to continue in my quest to prepare ourselves in our present to work hard for a better future. To be an entrepreneur nowadays, in my own industry, is like this Volvo Ocean Race 2017-2018. Full of amazing days, but scary and full of dangers because of the nature of the current state of the ocean. I am trying to be clean in a polluted world, a full of plastic residuals ocean. An ocean full of wind, currents and huge waves which can send us overboard too. But we love sailing, aren´t we and we have to finish this race.

Today, the race at Gurney´s Resorts was a blast. Bekking´s team Brunel won the race, Mapfre did it second and Vestas 11th Racing finished the third. Gurney´s Resorts is a lovely place. On its website we find Gurney´s Resort & Marina built on a small island in Narragansett Bay, and it has an outdoor pool!. I love to swim, so it was nice to see a pool there.  It wasn´t a sunny day in Rhode Island. And it was cold too. Completely the opposite weather we have seen on TV, at the sunny royal wedding of Harry and Meghan.  We will leave Newport tomorrow in the direction to Great Britain. Anyhow let´s see the video of the Gurney´s In-Port Race:

All I wish to write about our Newport Sojourn is: Let´s be kind to ourselves when doing strategic innovation. Our new goal when doing strategic innovation will be to include all the vectors we did not take into account during the last century: Talent Development, Ethical Awe, Generational Impact and a Purpose beyond just making money.

Do we want to fix and repair all the wrong consequences from the businesses of our ancestors? Let´s start with ethical values.  We just need some kindness to ourselves. I wish very much as of this year, all the Strategy and Entrepreneurship business school professors can include these human vectors in the strategic innovation models. Moreover, my most beloved dream is that banks and financial institutions start to request these 4 factors in their risk analysis for lending money to companies. 

Individuals, Entrepreneurs, and Corporate Offices will start to take these 4 human vectors into account just if the financial institutions start to require it. Banks and financial entities are responsible for providing resources for growth. I worked at the International Finance Corporation, and I had a huge list of requisites when a company went to our local bureau in El Salvador. Many of those requirements were financial, strategic and operational, but other requirements were about the quality of the business owners.  If the IFC (World Bank) starts to require ethical awe, purpose, talent development, and generational impact, I am sure many of the banks will start to follow these human practices, and this will replicate to the majority of the banks in the world. By doing it, business owners will start to take these 4 factors seriously.

In addition, ethics has to be taught in kindergarten, primary, secondary, high-school, university levels. Ethics has to be a formal class every week as it is sciences, math or literature. Each level of ethics course has to be in tune with the level of the brain development at each age. In kindergarten, ethics has to be as simple as to teach values as honesty, transparency, integrity, promise-keeping, and trustworthiness, the golden rule, loyalty, fairness, concern for others, respect, etc. And at University levels, ethics has to be taught solving ethical dilemmas about public offices and businesses in each industry and country of the world. There are thousands of ethical dilemmas to solve in class, each of those cases are worthy of discussion and deep analysis. Topics as corruption, whistleblowing, trust in marketing, workers´rights, discrimination, moral responsibility of corporations, trade secrets, code of ethics, corporate disclosure, insider trading, crooked accounting, ethical myopia, intellectual property, etc…  When I was an Ethics Professor for two consecutive years at ESEN, a top business school in town, believe me when I say I did enough research about business ethical dilemmas through cases (or we can use movies too), and I reassure you, 5 years of university (undergraduate) wouldn´t be enough to cover at least one ethical dilemma case per week. Ethics has to be taught with the same importance than STEAM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics). Maybe is time to include them at the beginning: ESTEAM (Ethics, Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics).  Probably my former boss from ESEN, a wise man who graduated as a P.H.D in Economics from the University of Chicago, former Academic Dean, Daniel Wisecarver, will agree with me completely. Doctor Wise (as we call him) hired me to taught business ethics, corporate strategy and finance during two years at ESEN Business School to senior students. Doctor Wisecarver (or Doctor Wise) always taught us that the key for good students is the quality of the professors. The more educated and well developed are the professors, the better will be the quality of the students, and with the quality of those citizens will prove to change societies too. And I hope my students still remember my classes. My teaching cap from those years, helped me a lot to be what I am right now. I also learned a lot by teaching them: it is not enough to teach ethics for a year, it has to be taught as of kindergarten throughout the rest of our lives.  

This is all for today. I am ready to leave Rhode Island. We are going to Cardiff, Great Britain tomorrow, and I hope the best for all of us. Europe is in our sight!

Thank you.

San Salvador, 18:03 pm (CST)

Published by eleonoraescalantestrategy

Corporate Strategy Artist, San Salvador, El Salvador View all posts by eleonoraescalantestrategy