The Hare and the Tortoise: The race is not to speedy (XXII). How time affects growth, stability and retrenchment? Part A.
… “The tortoise meanwhile kept going slowly but steadily”…
The hare and the tortoise, a fable by Aesop
Have a lovely last week of June 2021.
Our main topic of today is about how time affects growth, stability and retrenchment. In Corporate Strategy, as you already learned, the first group of decisions are related to growth and the pace of progress. Today we will shawl the reason why we have spent the last 21 episodes authoring about the notion of time and the existing theory about Corporate Strategy. Why do you think that we have to study the word “time” in our corporate strategy design and decision making? Why Aesop fable in the middle of all this? Everything is connected to the concept of speed, time and justice to prize the successful business models of our times.
I would like to start explaining to you with my own life as an example. As you are already aware, I have accomplished 50 years of life. Years measured in terms of an atomic clock. During all this time, as a heterosexual woman that likes and is attracted to love a person of male gender, I have wished with all my soul to marry and have babies, and that is something that I am still trying to pursue. I have not lost the faith for it. For the majority of my peers and below I am a left over, or a failure, that wasn´t able to achieve her maternity role. Some have even blamed me of being inadequate, or they have accused me falsely of belonging to the lesbian group, which is an epic absurd invention. I have had several boyfriends in the past who can confirm my heterosexual status.
The reason why I am not married yet, is so simple. I simply decided to wait to choose the right man with whom I will be vastly pleased and content, at every level: intellectually, mentally, sexually and in the middle of our quotidian affaires. I was raised in a Catholic school that taught me to do a “true love waits” promise and to wait until marriage to have sex. I also wish my future home with Alex Guillermo Lozano Artolachipi to be a refuge and a warm place full of love. I embraced that philosophy, and I kept my commitment, not as originally planned, but let´s say to a 99%. How time has affected my decisions of personal growth, if I have been “on hold for the last 20 years” since I returned to El Salvador?
Of course, time has passed by. I feel it, because wrinkles and white hair have emerged. But I still can swim 2,500 meters per hour, and I still run and practice spinning as better than any other average university teenager that you can compare me with. Ask to those who have watched me to do my fitness workouts at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA Sport Center El Salvador) before the pandemic. Of course, if you do a judgement comparison of my physical attributes with an Olympic champion, I am way behind in terms of the pace or velocity, but never in terms of accomplishing it (even slowly), and in terms of intellectual capabilities, regardless of the technologies around. The fact that I still don´t have kids, but I am wishing to, makes me conscious to practice habits that would keep me healthy for the long term. In addition, I am aware of the world that our future babies will live, and that makes me feel as those who are starting their own families. That makes me put myself on the shoes of those future mothers or those who are planning for a family. Time today, makes me comprehend the mess in which we live, and I feel it in my own skin daily. Sometimes I wish simply to marry Alejandro Lozano Artolachipi and fly away to a petit rural Italian village where no one can hurt us with the disruptive technologies around.
I am a human being with needs and wants as similar than one Generation Z that is planning to have a family. In the context of my own life, time is simply an opportunity for creation and procreation for a continuum that is wedged beyond the preconceived time notions of physics and philosophy.
In the context of my own life, time is simply an opportunity for loving creation and procreation in a continuum that is wedged beyond the preconceived time notions of physics and philosophy.
Eleonora Escalante
Eleonora Escalante Strategy “time” frame of reference. For Eleonora Escalante Strategy, the notion of time is beyond what I wrote during 7 episodes of this saga, about the legacy of our ancestors’ notion of time. I don´t see time as cyclic assessment that validates reincarnation, neither as a one-way view. I am reluctant to become a slave of the clock. I certainly believe that there is a theology of spiritual power that comes to rule the laws of the universe, including the famous Theory of Everything that Einstein never released. I believe that God created love, because love is all around us. And we just need to go for a walk to a gorgeous park to find it. We just need to see how good charity organizations help those in need. We just need to see the sacrifice of so many parents for their children. God is all around us. And love is the omnipresent origin of time.
The spiritual aspects of time. Given that frame of reference of Eleonora Escalante Strategy founder, once we understand that love and time are intertwined together by its origin, we land into an spiritual aspect of time that has not been touched, neither by the philosophers of time, nor by the physicists or astronomers. The spiritual force (called love) that links time with our endeavors has never been included. And that is why we are reaping the consequences of all the businesses that have damaged our soul, our nature, our ecosystems and our societies. When we do not integrate love and time into our businesses, we end up with bizarre ridiculous initiatives as the one of the President of El Salvador who wants to install bitcoin as an “alternative” to our dollar currency. When love is not included in our premise of time, we end up with a civilization that is hanging in the NAIQIs for future value creation (Nanotechnologies, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum supremacy and the Internet), and we end up living a lie of poverty, poverty of knowledge, poverty of love, and poverty of time.
How time affects growth, stability and retrenchment? Here we go. As corporate strategists, it is time to include the formula of love-time in our frameworks that I am releasing today. When doing decisions about the growth positioning and the pace of progress (pace understood as a velocity of growth, which is also related to time) our aim is to include the time and love question for analysis. That means to evolve from financial projections and rational finance returns, to a validating question of: is this investment or CAPEX project igniting love and solidarity in our society? Is this entrepreneurial initiative kindling to last at least 4 of our lifespans (400 years) in the future because it is helping our civilization to live in harmony and agreement? Is this research paper (for those who are dedicated to academic investigation) going to contribute to expand love and fix the current wrong frameworks? Is this endeavor moving from “increase economic profits and shareholder value” to “augment the integral value in our societies by considering time and love for them”?
This orientation of validating with love and time, toward growth implies to resolve what is better to a company or an entrepreneurial idea or a government initiative. Regardless if, to expand or to grow, to cut back (retrenchment), or to stay on hold and build stability.
Let´s see some examples:
EXAMPLE NUMBER ONE. In the case of growth, let´s go back to the year 2016, why would two competitors as ATT and Time Warner were approved to merge based on financial numbers and a vertical integration rationale, if we are creating a much-reduced number of players in the media mogul industry that end up acting as a cartel or monopoly? At the moment, in the United States, 6 corporations control 90% of the media outlets, and the top tier is: Comcast, ATT and Verizon for the distribution. These companies control what to watch, see and read “on-line” through other media channels. Where is love and time included in this merger/acquisition for growth?
EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO. The BNPL model: Buy Now Pay Later. This business model has come to compete against the credit or debit cards. The idea of opening new financial solutions to consumers backed up by fintech startups to finance their online purchases is popping up. But, have you seen what type of clients is attracting?
Where is love and time for Generation Z and millennials when we land into keeping free debt status. Why wouldn´t we help them to save, and once they have the money, the prize is to buy in cash and get a rebate? The BNPL for innovation is not helping the youngsters, but serving the vertical growth for on-line retailers?
EXAMPLE NUMBER THREE. Artificial Intelligence learning to create itself. Some researchers at technology companies are playing with software algorithms that are left running by themselves, so these can complete their training dojo for virtual bots. Where is love and respect for time included in this experimental adventure?
EXAMPLE FOUR. According to the Dialogue initiative the pandemic has heavily impacted education systems around the world, and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries are not the exception. Recently released estimates suggest that learning poverty could increase by over 20 percent in the region and more than two in three students in secondary education could fall below minimum proficiency levels.
https://americasquarterly.org/article/back-to-the-1960s-education-may-be-latin-americas-most-lasting-scar-from-covid-19/
In Latin America, the pre-existing socio-economic differences have exacerbated inequalities and digital divides such as access to infrastructure (connectivity and devices), availability of educational resources, as well as the development of digital skills among others. These preexisting conditions (or the lack thereof) are enough reasons to reopen the schools in a way that presence traditional classes (face to face) should be strengthened before even considering to go tech. For many kids, school was their refuge from home, a place in which they can set up a distance from poverty, where they can dream to become professionals in the future. To invest in educational technologies won´t solve the issues that were already outstanding before the pandemic.
A staggering two-thirds of world’s school-aged children – 1.3 billion children aged 3-17 – do not have internet connection in their homes or lack of a good space for learning, preventing them from acquiring vital skills needed to compete in the modern economy, a new UN report has revealed. 
There are differences in the amount of online instruction parents say their children have received during the coronavirus-related closures. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) 
An 11-year-old child studies his Class 6 textbooks and revises the exercises at home in Nairobi, Kenya. He cannot participate in online learning as his family has no mobile phone. UNICEF (Everett)
Where is love and respect for time in education for our kids and teenagers? To decide to go fully tech won´t help to overcome all the obstacles of education, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods where the Internet is not even available. The horizontal growth that Internet service providers are looking for, or the Smartphone-tablets-laptops companies by capturing students as a niche segment is not going to help students to be better educated.
EXAMPLE FIVE. To be continued…
Bibliography utilized today:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/27/1025453/artificial-intelligence-learning-create-itself-agi
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/05/993037261/opinion-how-latin-americas-kids-suffer-from-worlds-longest-covid-school-closings
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/15/lower-income-parents-most-concerned-about-their-children-falling-behind-amid-covid-19-school-closures/
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/08/1071112
http://vox.lacea.org/?q=blog/covid19_widen_educational_gaps
Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. Nevertheless, the majority of the pictures, images, or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 