What´s up with water: Pouring water in your corporate strategy (I). Introduction.
What a beautiful day to start our Summer Saga of 2022. The month of May is promising for everyone in the world. Some countries are enjoying what for the west is autumn, meanwhile, the west is fully beginning to bloom in flowers waiting for the summer. For us, the month of May is the best one. We celebrate our moms. We honor the rain, and for this delightful saga, we will sing the praises of water. Not just because we all are made of water, but because we truly expect you to enjoy it, and adore the reflections that come with us and the good weather. Today we prize the opening of “What´s up with water: Pouring water in your corporate strategy” as a celebration to respect for life, in our daily quotidian endeavors, and in our mindsets when we do corporate strategy.
By coincidence, in town, today we celebrate the day of the Cross, as in many other Latin-American countries. The tradition here is to put a cross of wood, ornamented with flowers, colorful paper streamers, and vibrant serpentines that cruise merrily with the breeze. The cross is situated by the families either at the entrance of the house or in the backyard. Around each vivid ornamented cross, kids fill it abundantly with flowers, fruits, and in some cases vegetables. At the end of the day, the food provisions are shared with your neighbors, relatives, and friends. Catholics celebrate it with processions, a mass, and thankful prayers before grabbing the fruits to eat (1). We also have learned that the Day of the Cross this Salvadoran tradition dates to colonial times, and it marks the start of the rainy season or winter in the country.
Introducing the discovery of water in our life.
Water is chaotic. Have you noticed it? Water is not a quiet muse. It is always in locomotion. When water is kept safeguarded by humans, it may seem under control because it is manipulated to stay calm in reservoirs, using recipients, and transported within pipelines. Though if you see the reality of water in its savage status, the discovery journey when observing water is not uncomplicated. Water is all upside-down because we can´t control it. “Water’s importance to nearly every natural process on earth cannot be underestimated. The water cycle is the movement of water around the Earth in all its forms, from the ocean to the atmosphere, to snow, soil, aquifers, lakes, and streams on land, and ultimately back to the ocean”(4) . Erroneously we believe that we have the switches that regulate water in all its forms and uses, but that is not true. We may manage some aspects of the ecosystem of water. However, none of our hegemonic rules can handle water, and climate change has come to prove it.
Water is a breakthrough. Water is messy, untidy, anarchic, tumultuous but immensely needed. Without water, the whole planet will perish. For centuries, water was an object of profound studies, that offered us so many findings. It took time for several genius generations to understand its core nature. What we know about water now is a legacy of a continuum of masterminds that asked themselves so many questions about it. These virtuosos tried to explain water from several perspectives. From the point of view of its chemical essence, from the physics, from the mechanics, from the engineering domains, from the mathematical calculations of its power, from the assessment of its origin, from the observation of what type of beings live in water, from the spectacle of rain, its wetness, and blessing for farming, from the outlook of the boats floating in the ocean, from the finding of creating electricity with its flows, from the panorama of our own bodies. Water is all around us, and sadly we still don´t care for it.
Water is transparent. In addition to what we already know about the translucency of water, we would like to add water into corporate strategy, because we also have observed that the rationale of doing corporate strategy is only about how to make money at expenses of our natural resources equilibrium, including water. Only a few years ago the elements of corporate social responsibility started to permeate our Board of Directors’ decisions, and just recently the most advanced corporations have added the Millenium development goals. Nevertheless, as much as transparency is one of the water´s properties, it is important to consider it in all our initiatives, enterprises, and industries.
When writing about pouring water into your corporate strategy, we always begin setting up our boundaries. Our governing roadmap as strategists is politically neutral. And again, we write without any political flag. We do not practice politics with our authorship or personal life. I have friends and/or acquaintances from all ranges of positions in the political spectrum. But I keep myself out of their political ventures. Permanently. That is why you will forever see me solitary in this town. I am very cautious and suspicious of relating with those who will hurt my heart with gossip or who by envy will begin connecting me with their political stuff. Those who really know me, are already certain about my neutral political philosophy, and that is what has been reflected here since 2016. In summary, our political-economy philosophy of neutrality is situated in the center of representative democracies, under the “eco-friendly” coverage shown below.
Of course, as part of the community of state-of-the-art strategy representatives, we also need to restrict this saga within our range of action, that is corporate strategy. We beg you to open your minds to a new type of content in corporate strategy, that we are still trying to ponder, with an exposure that will be an eye-opener for numerous strategy professors and consultants globally. We hope it can come as a revelation for them. In summary, this material pretends to be an example of how to design, implement and teach corporate strategy. We will write content at the level of a course on corporate strategy for the new MBAs and/or senior university undergraduates in economics and business administration. Last but not least, we write with so much simplicity so anyone can understand us. That is our branding treasure, to compose with clearness of expression to a point in which every enthusiastic about strategy can grasp and understand the role of Eleonora Escalante Strategy in this universe.
“The introduction has to be done once we finish the research”. Do you agree with this phrase? We believe it is true. Mais, up to a certain level of integrity. At Eleonora Escalante Strategy, the fact that we write “LIVE” state-of-the-art corporate strategy sagas, means that we are innovating all the time. We are doing some intuitive DBR (Design-based research), and we are examining and scrutinizing our intuitions while we are producing this content. We are painting while we are searching for answers. We are asking ourselves questions and finding our responses, with a scope that is bounded in this first chapter. We are also continuously guessing, thinking, taking notes, getting inspired, coming back and forth for writing, editing, reviewing on and on and on, to generate these publications “LIVE”. Therefore, this chapter is crucial for us. It is our starter, a preamble for the next 26 episodes. Sometimes, honestly, what we uncover in the saga deployment itself, is just a tiny part of another strategic cosmos of problems that need to be solved, and that is why we open the doors to a research agenda for the future. Not only because may give us additional material for other sagas, but because it may inspire other corporate strategists to philosophy accordingly. Likewise, Eleonora Escalante Strategy is always innovating against herself. More and more, we are writing our reflections based on our original own ideas production… And if you are very attentive to our details, by now, I am sure you have noticed it.
Introducing the discovery of water in corporate strategy will also be a surprising process. We believe in procuring it from a notion of integral strategy for future generations. So, this first chapter is about discovering what we are planning to do for you. It has been named under the term “Introduction” because we need to kick off our work in one way or another. In consequence, to avoid any misinterpretation, this first episode is the induction of our outline.
Our outline is shown above. Please print it in PDF format if you wish to keep our notes in your portfolio of knowledge. We strongly recommend you save or print our PDF PowerPoint slides per saga and keep them in a file or folder. They will help us someday, sooner or later, once we finally awake outside the mental barriers imposed by the NAIQIs (Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Supremacy, and the Internet). Well, adorable readers, this is it for today. Enough material for a curtain-raiser. Therefore, let´s proceed with our first strategic musical section too.
Strategic Music Section: As we promised to you, our saga “What´s up with water: Pouring water in corporate strategy”, will be fresh and pristine as water. Even in the strategic music section. We will knit the waves of water with corporate strategy in such a straightforward way, to show you how this should be done by the new generations. Hence, we will also link musical instruments with water. Our strategic contribution to music, as a form of art, pretends to keep the art alive as it was done by our ancestors. This saga won´t have any singers, but soloist virtuoso musicians. The protagonist will be an instrument that well represents water: the violin. But not any type of violin, but the best Strads (as these violins are baptized) or Stradivarius violins alive. We also will consider the luthiers Guarneri and Amati violins that still are being played in concerts nowadays. Stradivarius violins will be the first ones to explore in this saga. Many Strads are palpitating in the hands of soloist top violinists that have cognized by experience about what, how, when, and why the Stradivarius is so unique and distinctive, among other violins built in Cremona of Italy, more than 250 years ago.
We will share no more than one or two musical videos per episode of violin melodies. During the next 14 weeks, all that you will listen to in this section will be Stradivarius, Guarneri, or Amati violin music in the hands of 26 violinists. By the end of this saga, we also pray that you will understand why we choose the violin as the most genuine and classic representative of water.
The piece of today is an introduction to our aquatic stream journey. Just to put you in the context of what is a Stradivarius, and who was this craft-artist manufacturer of these instruments. We have chosen two informative videos about the Strads. The first one is an explanatory general one prepared by Bright Side (3). The second one is about an expensive Stradivarius by GP (2). These two videos are introductory to the interpretations of further episodes violinists, that await us. We invite you to discover with us the treasurable note beauties that come out of them. Sounds as transparent as water.
See you next Friday, with the second episode of “What´s up with water: Pouring water in your corporate strategy”. Thank you for reading to me.
Sources of Reference cited today:
- https://www.catholiccompany.com/magazine/may-3rd-day-of-cross-5817
- https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/
- https://brightside.me/
- https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/nasa-earth-science-water-cycle
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, most 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.
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