Hello Hello again.
After a well-deserved vacation, here we are furthermore, with hugs of gratefulness to all our adorable readers who have been our rock of support during the last sagas. Our appreciation and greatest wishes to all of you during 2023. Particularly we are rejoiced to accompany all your heart desires in accordance with your New Year list of resolutions. Have you already done it? This list is usually a pre-requisite for all of us before the beginning of the month of January. Remember, our goals to achieve in this coming year are more than our personal commitments. These are our personal life objectives. These goals are promises to ourselves. These pursuits are our firm determination to renew, re-invent or achieve our new or previous commitments at the spiritual, well-being, parenthood, professional, educational, social, economic, and financial levels. These should be set out with a simple list. But don´t despair, if you have not done it yet, we are still on time to do it. The New Year’s resolutions list is our courage to have a roadmap for our life or our “personal strategic planning”.

Our origins with the Volvo Ocean Race 2017-2018.
Some years ago, Eleonora Escalante Strategy efforts started with the Volvo Ocean Race 2017-2018. At that time, we had no idea what was the meaning of that race. We also had no clue what was going to be the adventure of moving from port to port all around the world. Casually by some, or by God´s purpose for me, in August 2017, we paired with 7 teams who were racing in a VO65 model boat. And we all embraced the possibility of an uncertain unknown immense ocean to travel. And that is how we started our voyage of authorship about strategic frameworks.  Our memories about that 13th edition race were full of tales not only just hard-core pure theoretical material. My commitment was to show you in 11 legs and respective stopovers, all the major business strategy bases, or analytical structures. We also were shattered and drained in the middle of the Southern Ocean and the doldrums, feeling the pain and the joy of the sailors, while we were trying to keep up their route full of surprises and despair. Lessons of life awaited us then, and the ocean taught us more than what we tried to teach.

The Ocean Race 2022-2023.  
Four years have passed since then and we have kept racing with thoughtful strategic reflections for the soul.  We have written 16 sagas as proof of evidence.

1. Value Proposition (14 episodes)
2. Strategy regatta at the Volvo Ocean Race 2017-2018 (with more than 200 publications)
3. Entrepreneurs without money (35 episodes)
4. Integral Education: Strategic Challenges and a Roadmap ahead (30 episodes)
5. How do I wish a country´s president to think? (9 episodes)
6. Corporate Strategy as an Art: Saga is on hold until full sponsorship
7. Revenge Strategy: Wasting the power of your hate with the guiltless(50 episodes)
8. Losing our brains with disruptive technologies (41 episodes)
9. On eagles’ wings: our recovery from Coronavirus (51 episodes)
10. The Fallacy of the Middle-Class: Overcoming social resentment (26 episodes)
11. High Quality vs Low-Cost Bargain: The Current Dichotomy! (26 episodes)
12. The Hare and the Tortoise: The race is not to speedy (29 episodes)
13. Portfolio Analysis: Igniting a long-term spirit in a short-term world (34 episodes)
14. Bees at work (32 episodes)
15. What´s up with water (30 episodes)
16. Loving to read as a strategist (30 episodes)
17. From the Enlightenment to Business Models (with the Ocean Race 2023). Starting today.

Today we are flooded with joy and hope. We are commencing our 17^th saga. Amazingly, we are returning to our conception, to our quest into the sea, to our roots of formation. Since we were born with the Volvo Ocean Race 13th Edition, here we go again with our second intent. With a new topic that will be revealing and challenging. Do you remember that I owe you the enlightenment and the newspaper topics from our past saga? Well, we have decided to explore it fully, as it has to be done. We have decided to immerse ourselves into a new sort of participative saga, for which our readers (and ourselves) will be demanded to read while our team-mate sailors will be navigating in the ocean.

According to the Ocean Race website: “The race’s concept is simple: it’s a round-the-clock pursuit of competitive edge and the ultimate ocean marathon, pitting the sport’s best sailors against each other across the world’s toughest waters”. For those who are reading about the Ocean Race for the first time, I truly recommend you visit their website, and get acknowledge about why, how, and all the whereabouts with more detail. You can find everything here: www.theoceanrace.com

Why do we pair with the Ocean Race to compose the saga “From the enlightenment to business models”?
There are several reasons. Our rationale to accompany the Ocean Race every time the competition occurs is our compromise to remember our origins. As CEO and Founder of Eleonora Escalante Strategy, I simply can´t forget it. We don´t know how much God will raise us or bless us in the future, but we are certainly sure that we can´t forget our roots. The Volvo Ocean Race 2017-018 brought me back to my strategy life, and later, also kicked off the desire to shift my route to become an author. We have not stopped since then. One thing takes you to another one: I also began to explore watercolors because I wanted to illustrate my first book “Strategy Regatta” with my own aquarelles. Painting has overloaded me with satisfaction since then.

The second motivation is that we truly believe that the water cycle recovery is the medulla to recuperate our planet from climate change. There is something that we can elevate from the vastness of the oceans that could fix our climate change issues. But we need to discover it. Last year, we already wrote a saga related to these matters named “What´s up with water”. The oceans are huge, complex, and mysterious. Many times some hints on how to do problem-solving for our most critical issues are waiting to be revealed to our own scientists and multidisciplinary academic squads. Our climate change problem-solver teams, are looking forward and also watching the oceans, and are waiting for funds to continue doing their research endeavors. We can´t be inconsiderate towards them.  As a corporate strategist, our firm is boldly committed to helping to roll out the ball in problem-solving these issues with a new integral approach. We are contributing with our support, a grain of sand, that is linked to a new philosophy of doing corporate strategy. And our devotion to it is our daily bliss.

We can´t do a good corporate strategy, without a thoughtful brain. Everything begins with how well can we all understand the most critical problems of planet Earth. Many times, we don´t hold the 360 degrees panorama of our issues, and that is why our solutions are incomplete, biased, or completely wrong. By coupling schedules with the Ocean Race 2022-2023, we are causing awareness about the oceans in the water cycle, and maybe, we probably will trigger a piece of the puzzle that is needed when we are trying to find solutions to the oceans in crisis. Probably the oceans are also getting our attention because God is maybe telling us that the oceans are part of the solution to recuperate our planet´s sanity and stability. Our sailors at the Ocean Race 2022-2023 edition may help us to tackle the ocean´s troubles in different ways. Open your eyes, there is something to uncover, that we have not seen yet.

Everything and everyone appear in our lives for a reason.  The third reason is beyond the race competition, or beyond who is the winner. The Ocean Race is always a surprise. The ocean hits you. The ambiguity of water is minute-by-minute reflected in the itinerary. Years of preparation can be barred if the teams are not careful enough to react on time with everything in place. The lack of one single gear can kill a sailor. Our path into corporate strategy is the same. We have reached levels of complicated vagueness because of business models which have not been designed properly, and we need to fix that. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated to us, that in the middle of the panic, technologies are useless. Additionally, natural disasters can wipe out any technological advancement if we are not aware of the whole picture. We certainly believe that we need to explore the current business models´ philosophy, by going to the roots of its underlying principles, and by going back to the enlightenment period. And that is why we will race with the Ocean Race 2022-2023, in our quest to discover it. Some may argue that we won´t find anything by going to the past. We truly believe there is something that needs to be sort-out there. And we will try to do it.

“From the Enlightenment to business models” outline for the year.
It is the turn to land into our strategic planning goals for the winter/spring saga of the year. Some changes will occur with this saga. We will only post once a week (we have selected Fridays), but if we feel that we need to add an episode in between our schedules, we will also insert it. Nevertheless, we will try to publish only on Fridays. The purpose of this shift is based on the amount of reading that we will do. We will be required to read an average of 100 pages a day from our required textbooks. This whole experience has been conceived to raise anyone from Literacy 2 or 3 to Literacy 5 level (literacy classified by the OECD). Those who wish to uplift their reading capabilities will find in this saga the opportunity to improve. In addition, my goal to paint watercolors will stand up continuously in this saga.

The saga has been divided into two seasons. The first one corresponds to three legs of the Ocean Race 2022-2023, and the second season goes from Leg 4 to Leg 7.  For this current season (Winter-Spring 2023), find the description below:

We have prepared the following presentation slides which are self-explanatory. If you wish to download or print the next slides in PDF Format, do not hesitate to do it. The whole calendar of our intentions, the route, the general guidelines of the saga, and the subjects of our episodes per Friday is described below.

Required reading. As we mentioned above, the fact that we will publish only once a week has a pure particular purpose: we will read a lot. And I want you to read with me. Otherwise, you won´t get what I will write in every episode. At least the main textbooks are listed below:

1. Isaac Kramnick. “The Portable Enlightenment Reader”, Penguin Books, 1995. 794 pages.
2. Jonathan Israel. “A revolution of the mind”. Princeton University Press, 2010. 294 pages.
3. Jonathan Israel. “The radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of Modernity, 1650-1750″. Oxford University Press, 2001. 847 pages.
4. Jonathan Israel. “Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of man, 1670-1752”. Oxford University Press, 2006. 1025 pages.
5. Jonathan Israel. “Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790”. Oxford University Press, 2011. 1083 pages.
6. Jonathan Israel. “The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830”. Oxford University Press, 2019. 1081 pages.
7. Louis Dupré. “The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture”. Yale University Press. 2005. 416 pages.
8. Other books will be announced with anticipation.

If you wish to understand this saga, your reading is not just crucial but outrageously claimed. Get these books, si ´l vous plait. Please. Either in original or print from a digital valid source. Make a schedule of reading and try to at least read 100 pages per day to cover all these pages during the next 90 days. After this saga, the following names won´t be unknown to any of us:  Descartes, Jefferson, D´Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet, Bayle, Hume, Kant, Locke, Montesquieu, Paine, Turgot, Rousseau, Smith, Spinoza, Voltaire, Newton, Wollstonecraft, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Smith, Herder, Schiller, Foucault, Vico, Diderot, in between others.

Eleonora Escalante Strategy Approach.
The whole picture of our episodes is from the point of view of an integral strategist. What we do now, is strategic reflections for the soul as the core of our life. This is not a history class. It is not a social philosophy style of writing or another political/literature course that already exists and is taught by my colleagues in top universities on the planet. We are unique, we are always reinventing our content in every episode, no matter the outcome of our articles, our rationale is distinctive and exceptionally rare. We do not pursue the socialist ideology. But we firmly believe in ethical capitalism, the next step to improve our economical-political systems. Our reasons to write are very well known by all of you. Eleonora Escalante Strategy principles are being released every time we initiate a saga, so here we go all over again.

Our main rationale to write this saga, as in all the epics that we produce, is to wake you up, to make you think, to shake your thoughts, and to help you to land into the art of reflecting before making decisions, but with an integral 360 degrees approach. Even though we focus on terms of education, business, and economics; we can apply any of our material to our quotidian lives. Our rationale is also to help people to read again. We don´t produce videos with the clever intention that you can read our “not so flawless English” which is packed with integral and well-being content for your awareness.

“From the enlightenment to business models” is an oceanic Giga content saga.  We will journey in the oceans to discover the enlightenment period of our history to understand how we landed into business models as we do in our current times. Our philosophy for this saga is pivotal to embark ourselves to change the corporate strategy’s current conceptualization and formulation as it is taught and applied in business schools and the business world. So, this saga is again fine-tuned to offer some hints of what the meaning of corporate strategy should be. We will go back to the roots of our pre-capitalist thoughts which are found in the period of history defined as the enlightenment (from 1650 to 1800 approximately). Nowadays, since the advent of the Smartphone all together with the NAIQIs, our political-economical-social systems are entering a phase that many intellectuals from several ideologies have started to glimpse as technological feudalism or techno-feudalism, taking us back to the times of techno monarchy-authoritarianism, as before the Renaissance.

We raise by lifting others. In consequence, we will stick to our main logical reasoning: The role of a business is not to maximize shareholder value for accumulating insanely with selfish reasons, but to give back to help others, to organize our human coexistence by raising our well-being (in every culture and every country), to protect our natural resources, and all living species, to promote our humanity and solidarity, to love God, to love others as ourselves with our businesses, and to prevent any type of harm between us in our present and future.

Our specific objectives with the saga “From the enlightenment to business models” are:

1. To understand the enlightenment as the roots of the pre-capitalism daysprings and twilights. It is impossible to understand our current capitalism troubles if we don´t go back to the enlightenment.
2. To perform our most difficult literature race by reading more than 7,000 pages about the enlightenment in the following 3 months.
3. To explore the enlightenment period and its authors’ contributions with a strategic overview that goes beyond the history, literature, philosophy, social, political, environmental, and religious perspectives. We will do it from the point of view of integral strategic management.
4. To dedicate 90 days of our life to performing strategic reflections and honing our critical skills about the contexts, strategic innovation factors, and main subjects related to the philosophers and authors that moved the waves of the enlightenment period.
5. To paint 14 watercolors of diverse categories. Our inspiration will be the enlightenment and the ocean race experience.
6. To confirm (once again) that the only way to repair our economic-social-political imbalances is by fixing our capitalist system. I am a firm believer in ethical capitalism. But if we do nothing to fix the premises of our excesses with capitalism, we will return back to the days before the enlightenment, to the dark ages using the channel of disruptive digital technologies as our platform to exterminate democracy and freedom as well.
7. To procure and pitch a research agenda about the enlightenment and its connection with our business models. This agenda will help the next generations to fix our troubles with business modeling.
8. Finally, enjoy the Ocean Race 2023. It is a treasure to support this event that occurs every 4 years. Each ocean race in the past has been a quest on how humans have tried to conquer the ocean not just to finish first. Nowadays is our turn to learn to observe and listen to the oceans. The sailors’ journey will show us the ocean from a different perspective, by watching that ocean, I am sure our scientist-multidisciplinary squads all over the world will come up with new ideas on how to fix the problem of climate change and global warming. It is just a matter of looking at the problem from a different perspective. Watch out. Please. Observe, please. This Ocean Race is our opportunity to investigate. It is our chance to shake our awareness to the children and the youth, so they will never forget to study, explore, and discover how our oceans are telling us when we are imbalanced. And cleverly, the same oceans hold the solution to all these water cycle troubles that we see because of pollution and mismanagement of our planet’s resources.

Announcement.
Next Friday 20th we will publish our second episode: “What is the enlightenment”.

Ocean Musical Section

As a kick-off to our saga, today we are sharing two videos:

See you next Friday 20th, with the second episode of the saga “From the Enlightenment to business models: What is the enlightenment”. Thank you for reading to me. Blessings.

Sources of reference are utilized today.
None

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.  All are used as Illustrative and non-commercial images. Utilized only informatively for the public good. Nevertheless, most of this blog’s pictures, images, or videos are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.

Published by eleonoraescalantestrategy

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