The hare and the tortoise: The race is not to speedy (I). Overture.

eleonoraescalantestrategy 16 Apr 2021 Leave a Comment

Here we are again. After Eleonora Escalante Strategy vacations. Thank you for letting me have some days off. As I mentioned to you, fifteen days ago, my little dog Cherry passed away. And I ended up sad and completely exhausted. I was so overwhelmed by the situation of Cherry’s sickness, that when she left us, I tried to set a genuine time out, as if I was emerging from a heavy-duty boot camp of tragedy. Since March 31st, I have tried to stay out of social media. To do not visit websites in my search for information and knowledge. To simply relax and reflect a bit about the significance of life and simply be. And it has been worthy.

*Cherry Escalante. June 2015-March 2021.* Rest in Peace.

Cherry was not just a pet. She was my friend. Suddenly, when Cherry died, after three months of fighting next to her who was struggling to survive, I felt an unfilled space in my heart. Losing Cherry, provoked a tumultuous chaos inside of me. Since then, I have acquainted how hard it is to don’t find someone I love in my quotidian life anymore. I miss to find Cherry’s existence in that spot of the house, were she was saying hello moving her tail. Now, this place is empty. And this experience has hollowed me. How hard it is to lose someone you really care. Sometimes, all these questions of what-if I should have done this or that to save her, come back. I also regret I did not spend more time with Cherry, I mean it… she was always there around me, and I was working for extensive hours. All these days I have asked myself, why didn’t I devote more minutes during each day, only to celebrate her existence, playing, hugging, walking or running around. Particularly when she was still healthy and she could do it. I deeply regret of spending excessive hours doing my work in front of this laptop or a mobile, meanwhile Cherry, holding an avocado on its snout, asked me to play with her. Now, if we extend this impact, to those loved humans around us, who are still alive, and we do not recognize how much time we lose in front of the mobile screens, or inventing crazy tech, or working all day, or in daily fights or discussions, in complaining, in avoiding our loved ones presence or what is worst, criticizing their existence… Then we will regret later all the time we forfeit by not spending it sagely with them. Nowadays, too much waste of time is lost because of our addiction to technologies. Time that we later will not have, because we did not use it wisely.

Time to Change. Recover the time in what is worthy. During these vacation days, the loss of Cherry made me think of trying to change, to find a dedication to celebrate the time of life. I am recognizing that it is imperative to cherish the time, you have with your loved ones, regardless if members of your family, friends, or pets. During the pandemic sickness of COVID19 we have lost three members of our family. As many other families in the world. Regardless of the misfortune, we are all exposed to fact that some day we will be passing away too. By an accident or a tragedy, or by natural causes. Only God protects us to stay for as long his mighty will wishes. One day any of us may not be here anymore, and we will remorse that we lost our years trying to pursue insignificant things, or chasing to work for more than 10 hours a day, or holding a Smartphone as in hell tech, or trailing a techie life-style that only set walls that separate us from others. In the case of the disruptive emerging technologies, many of us wrongly think that the NAIQIs have come to make our life easier _{(NAIQI is the acronym of all the technologies based on Nanotechnologies, Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing and the Internet)}. But I believe the excessive usage of them are making us sick (mentally, tangibly and socially). And we continue choosing to lose our time by not sharing our real life, but by selecting the virtual one. Look, we only have a maximum of 80 to 100 years of life span (If God grants us the permission to live healthily), and we are racing our lives to a nonrefundable flair where if we accept the tech isolation as a modus vivendi-operandi, we are not only compromising our physical social life with our loved ones, but also wasting our time. However, we are also losing our crucial spiritual reason to stay in this planet, is to share our gift of life with others alive, and make of this planet a better place for all.

Easy money without efforts. Where are we going in this race? Every day I am swamped, and sometimes drowned with information. Every week, I am reading head news as follows: “A wave of new media stars launch VC funds to capitalize on their massive audiences”. “Universities are selling courses as Driving Collaboration and Optimization with Data-Driven Marketing Transformation or how to use AI to lead”. “Cryptocurrencies of any name such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, latcoin, polkadots, tethers, moneros, binance coins, etc.; rising up to limits of 63,000 dollars”. “How to SPAC my stonks with Non Fungible Tokens or NFTs”. “How healthcare is the next big Tech battleground”. “How to scale Artificial Intelligence”. “How robots are taking industries”. “Best hardware for machine learning”. “How Twitter almost spent $4B to buy Clubhouse”. “A digital artist selling an art collection of NFTs for 17 billion dollars”. “Community bills”. “A Singapore super app Grab going public by SPAC merging with another company”. “Gaming data sets”. “IoB or Internet of Behaviors”. “The last Stories of how millennials have gotten rich in 6 years by investing US$300,000 in a startup crypto coin base, and is now worth 2 billion dollars”; meanwhile “Bitcoin is also trying to do its public debut soon”. Suddenly every time I visit the Gartner hype cycle curves of the year, this gives me goose bumps!

“The hare and the Tortoise: the race is not to speedy” is just beginning.

It is time. “The hare and the Tortoise: the race is not to speedy” is based in a fable from Aesop. It is the most famous of its fables. And we will use it to learn about “time” in corporate strategy. It is a race between two animals, in which the time is the key dimension of the result. In short, it is an epic about time. I have already prepared the outline, and we will share it by tomorrow. I hope you will be delighted to learn with me. By understanding the notion of time, we might be able to decide to change our ways. The only resource that no big leader company as Amazon, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway or any other billionaire conglomerate on earth can’t own is “time”. The measure of money that we cannot control is always time. Time that we lose by investing it in so many wrong businesses and services, or time that we decide to spend for what really matters. In reality it is our life shared with our loved ones that matters the most.

Before finishing this post, let’s introduce the pivotal Aesop fable of our saga. We will have 26 more episodes to understand what is the relationship between corporate strategy and the Aesop fable that has inspired us to write this second saga of the year 2021. You can also click here to read it with a better resolution: http://read.gov/aesop/025.html