Category Archives: Twitter & Media

January 22, 2012 · 10:00 am

Savings and consultants

Last Friday, I wrote a post about a measure by the US DoD to produce efficiencies by publishing the actual cost of the preparation of each report and study in the front of each document.

As part of that same  “Defense Efficiencies Initiative” launched in 2010 by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, there were as well the following two:

“[…] immediately cut the dollars allocated to advisory studies by 25 percent.”

“[…] cut the size of the staff support contractor cadre by 10 percent per year for three years […]”

Another report (1) by the Congressional Research Service  [PDF, 86KB] assessing the efficiency of Gates’ initiatives found these ones as the ones with the higher potential savings for the DoD.

Nearly everyone working in a big corporation can sympathise with such initiatives, having sometimes wondered where is the added value of certain reports or the cost/benefit of shiny consultants’ teams brought in to solve an important issue based on noise-affected inputs received by insiders in too-short time to digest them only to produce yet another costly report and leave having created barely anything else but costly entropy.

A former colleague has a wall in his office covered by a collection of tens of leaflets from what he calls “strategic consultants”. I took on his habit of picking those leaflets, and even though I don’t collect them I do publish them in my Twitter account from time to time:

That much for the perceived value of consultants.

—

(1) Cost of Congressional Research Service assessment not available.

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November 5, 2011 · 10:00 am

El Cosmonauta

Hace algo más de un año acudí con un amigo a la conferencia TEDxMadrid. Allí fue donde por primera vez escuché hablar de la película “El Cosmonauta”, por voz de su director, Nicolás Alcalá.

Desde entonces he escuchado y leído varias veces hablar sobre la película. Lo novedoso de la misma radica en su planteamiento como proyecto de crowdfunding. No me quiero extender sobre ello, ya que se ha escrito mucho sobre el asunto y podéis encontrar mejores explicaciones (por ejemplo aquí – PDF). En definitiva, como las palabras indican en inglés, el crowdfunding se trata de financiarse a través de muchos pequeños inversores que realizan pequeñas aportaciones y reciben contrapartidas en proporción a su inversión.

En aquel primer momento no invertí ninguna cantidad. Sin embargo, ya hace algo más de un año escribí en este blog también acerca de este proyecto, del crowdfunding y de otras iniciativas que había encontrado en internet (Kickstarter y GrowVC).

Desde hace meses le tenía perdida la pista al proyecto, pero ayer, por casualidad, vi un tweet donde se enlazaba el tráiler de la película.

No sé qué os parece a vosotros, pero a mí me causó una muy buena impresión. Volví a leer en su web acerca de la situación actual del proyecto, de la financiación que les queda por conseguir y de las formas que había de colaborar.

Esta vez no tuve que pensármelo mucho: me hice inversor y productor de la película aportando 132€.

De esta forma colaboro con una nueva forma de hacer cine, me inicio en el crowdfunding (aunque la experiencia de Kiva también es crowdfunding, aunque sin ánimo de lucro), me mantengo al corriente de una forma más directa con el proyecto, me acerco a un sueño de la infancia y cumplo uno de mis numerosos objetivos anuales (invertir en algún proyecto de crowdfunding – esta vez también con ánimo de lucro).

¿Os animáis a colaborar?

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July 29, 2011 · 8:00 am

Numbers, numbers, numbers…

As part of my effort to learn French, I was reading some passages of “Le Petit Prince” last weekend. There was one that directly struck me:

Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres. Quand vous leur parlez d’un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l’essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais: “Quel est le son de sa voix? Quels sont les jeux qu’il préfère? Est-ce qu’il collectionne les papillons?” Elles vous demandent: “Quel âge a-t-il? Combien a-t-il de frères? Combien pèse-t-il? Combien gagne son père?” Alors seulement elles croient le connaître. Si vous dites aux grandes personnes: “J’ai vu une belle maison en briques roses, avec des géraniums aux fenêtres et des colombes sur le toit…” elles ne parviennent pas à s’imaginer cette maison. Il faut leur dire: “J’ai vu une maison de cent mille francs.” Alors elles s’écrient: “Comme c’est joli!

Some days before I had seen the following tweet by the management guru Tom Peters:

Having said this, I can only confess that I am one of those. One of those old people, grande personne, that loves numbers, crunching numbers, spreadsheets, etc…

If you asked me something about for example my drive to the job every morning, I wouldn’t say “Oh, it’s beautiful, there are lots of trees, you can smell this or that”, no, no…

I would tell you: “it takes door-to-door an average of 31 minutes -which coincidentally is the exact time most repeated-, I depart at 8:35am on average, I have tried 3 different routes and route number 3 seems to be about 4 minutes shorter on average than the other 2 routes, I found out that it is as good to be an early comer to the office than to arrive at about 9:30am, while the worst time to leave home is about 8:15am… Tuesdays are the worst days normally, taking on average about 5 minutes more than Wednesdays, the best day”. Numbers.

And I would have said all these because during the last 7 months I had been taking note of the all the numbers related to those trips, crunching them in a spreadsheet, etc, etc…

Door to door time to reach the office.

Frequency of different trip times.

Certaines grandes personnes aimons les chiffres.

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May 25, 2011 · 7:00 am

Toastmasters D59 2011 Spring Conference (#tm59)

I belong to a couple of Toastmasters clubs in Madrid and Toulouse. Within the organization, clubs are gathered in areas, areas in divisions and divisions in districts. My clubs are part of District 59 which during last weekend it held the spring conference.

District 59 comprises continental Europe. It is now composed of 190 clubs, having grown from 53 in 2001! (or ~14% compounded annual growth during the last decade) and over 5,300 members. At the event we were about 300 Toastmasters (just over 5% of the population), in which had been the largest District conference in the history of the district.

The weekend was great. I started on Friday by going for a sightseeing 10km run through Lisbon as we would not have any time out of the conference. Then, I together with another ~60 members attended a wonderful workshop by Darren LaCroix which I described in a previous post.

This was followed by which it’ll be my last DECM (or District Executive Committee Meeting, as Area Governor of H2) for a while. There it was decided that in the next District Conference there will be semi-finals to shorten the Saturday speech contest (the conference itself was moved to 25-27 November, in Basel, Switzerland). The District is performing well, now ranking #2 of ~80 districts in the World, though it won’t be recognised unless more CCs and ACs are achieved (Competent and Advance Communicator awards). Then the conference itself started.

This was a special event as Pat Johnson, Toastmasters international president, was also present. She gave two keynote speeches: one about the typical Toastmaster member (to discover there isn’t such in TM diversity) and another one on leadership (“It’s amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care about who gets the credit”, H. Truman), both very good presentations, full of insight and experiences.

Toastmasters 2.0

One important thing to note is that this has been the first conference to be widely tweeted. I had attended other Toastmasters conferences in which only some members were tweeting the event, but in this one tweeting was openly encouraged by Jack Vincent, the moderator of the District account (@Toastmasters59), and proved to be a success. Check it out searching the hash tag #tm59 for everything related to the District or #tmlx11 for that particular conference related matters.

On Sunday morning there was a panel discussion about experiences of using the web in Toastmasters. I especially liked the information shared by Marina Lussich, from her club, Barcelona TM. They got to incorporate the use of the web into the Competent Leader manual by assigning roles as “blogger of the day”, etc, which are taken into account for the CL award. Great idea!

In that session it was also raised the possibility of getting sponsors to cover the costs for the streaming of the conference in the future (privacy issues of contestants should be taken into account). It could be interesting for Basel.

Contests

Finally, the most important part of the weekend: the contests. Again we had the chance of witnessing 2 fabulous contests. The Evaluation Contest results were:

  1. John Zimmer,
  2. Olivia Schofield,
  3. Dermot Greene.

The International Speech contest results were:

  1. Olivia Schofield, who will get to represent D59 at the International Convention in Las Vegas!
  2. Peter Zinn,
  3. Gerard Penalosa.

Congratulations to all contestants!

Once again: The organization of the event was superb: The venue, the rooms, the availability of free wi-fi, meals, soundtrack of the event, characterization of the conference chair as Henry the Navigator, performance of a university Tuna group, the Gala Dinner, the helpdesk, etc… Congratulations guys! After having been in 3 conferences organized by you, you rock and keep getting better!

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March 19, 2011 · 11:00 am

Lamentable entrevista de Ana Pastor a Mahmud Ahmadineyad

El pasado día 15 leí varios tweets haciendo referencia a una entrevista que la periodista de TVE Ana Pastor había hecho a Mahmud Ahmadineyad. Así que la vi.

Debo ser muy raro, porque no he dejado de leer elogios a la periodista y a mí me parece que la entrevista, el papel que hizo como entrevistadora, es lamentable. Sin paliativos.

Me explico:

Se pasa la entrevista interrumpiendo las respuestas del entrevistado o apresurándole con frases del tipo “déjeme estamos terminando, me dicen que se me acaba el tiempo”.

En ocasiones contradice al entrevistado. Aunque éste diga cosas que no sean ciertas, ¿interesa acaso lo que piense la entrevistadora?.

Sonríe mostrando desinterés por las respuestas del entrevistado. Por ejemplo, cuando Ahmadineyad le dice que las armas que usa Libia son vendidas por Occidente. Quizá no le guste escucharlo, pero antes de hacer la entrevista podría haberse informado y habría visto que es cierto.

Esto último me es fácil de comprobar porque he visitado las fuentes anteriormente. Dejo a continuación un par de ejemplos fácilmente demostrables:

  • España. Fuente: el ministerio de industria [PDF]. Las exportaciones en 2009 NO fueron de defensa ni armas como la prensa ha dicho en varias ocasiones, sino lo que se llama material de doble uso, como radares para navegación y control de tráfico aéreo. En total fueron 12.7 millones de €. Habría luego que ver el uso que finalmente se le da.
  • Francia e Italia. Fuente: el Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), autoridad internacional en la materia. En la siguiente herramienta, se puede hacer una búsqueda de exportaciones de armas con destino Libia en los últimos 20 años. Aparece un registro por valor de ~168M€ de exportación de misiles anti-tanque MILAN por parte de Francia, y otro por valor de ~80M€ de exportación de helicópteros por parte de Italia.
  • Estados Unidos. Fuente: el Departamento de Defensa. En su informe anual de 2009 [PDF] muestra como Libia, que había estado bajo embargo durante años, desde 2006 comenzó a recibir exportaciones comerciales de armas desde Estados Unidos, aunque por un valor muy bajo, menos de 1M$ en 2009.
  • …

Si la gente vitorea la entrevista porque le ha plantado cara a Ahmadineyad, me parece bien, pero le podría haber tirado un zapato o una estatuilla de Il Duomo a la cara, en vez de hacer una entrevista.

Si TVE quería incordiar y molestar a Ahmadineyad, podría haber hecho muchas otras cosas, en vez de una entrevista.

Si querían presentar una imagen deplorable o ridícula de Ahmadineyad podrían haber hecho un documental, en vez de una entrevista.

A mi ese hombre también me parece detestable. Pero es que Ana Pastor termina la entrevista diciendo “creemos que es bueno escuchar todas las opiniones”, y precisamente eso es lo que no ha hecho. Si desde TVE, no lo querían hacer que no le hubiesen puesto un micrófono delante para empezar.

Lamentable.

Lo único bueno que me pareció que tuvo la entrevista fue el saludo final en farsi.

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March 14, 2011 · 8:00 am

Bin Laden hidden in a football field

Some weeks ago I read in the newspaper one of these mistakes that you may find so often with some journalists (apologies for journalist friends who may feel criticized). I checked some weeks later and it hasn’t been corrected, so I’ll let you know.

The article is about a plan to capture Bin Laden. It says that he is hidden in a region of 11.585 square meters up in the mountains… I checked the cables (6) mentioned in the article and in no one it says the size of the region. I haven’t been there in Waziristan, but I know the figure is wrong. I say I know, not I suspect. That’s the problem with some journalists they just don’t know nevertheless they write about it.

11.585sqm is the size of the garden of my parents’ neighbour. It is a square of 107 by 107 meters, a football field so to say. Do you believe that Bin Laden is succeeding in hiding himself in a football field from an army of thousands? Then he could have just titled it “Bin Laden hidden in a football field!”, a much more catchy headline to attract readers.

I am sure that in your respective fields of knowledge you have seen plenty of similar cases that make you doubt about everything you read in papers.

I believe the guy took the info from the Wikipedia. There it says 11.585 square kilometres (a region the size of Madrid region) and he just copied it wrongly… don’t know what is worse: whether copying without understanding or copying without caring about mistakes, you name it.

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February 9, 2011 · 8:00 am

Start blogging

Today it’s been a year since I started this blog. I wrote the first post on February 9th 2010, and went live a few days later. I had been musing the idea of starting it for some months plus some people close to me encouraged me to do so as well.

In the end I decided to give it a try. Initially, I took it as a learning process: It would force me to learn what that of blogging was, some etiquette about them, etc… Few days after the starting the blog I created my Twitter account and gave it a try with some other tools… still, there are many other tools and applications that I still have to learn and use.

During those days I had the simile in my head of our previous generation: some of them are not even using the internet for as little as 10% of the things we use it for (buying things, social media, reading the papers, watching videos, etc.). It all started because some years ago they did not push themselves to try it, when it was all starting. This was what moved me to start. Who knows how the Internet will evolve from now to 10 years time? But what it is sure is that it won’t go backwards, so we better do as much as we can not to stay behind.

I just finished reading the book “Todo va a cambiar”, by Enrique Dans (in Spanish; I may write about the book soon), in the last chapters you may read the following passage:

“¿Debe […] empezar un blog? La respuesta es clara y concisa: si no lo ha hecho hasta ahora, sí”

Starting the blog is relatively easy; you just need to follow the instructions of any of the free blogging services. Continuing with it is a bit more difficult. You need to be creative, think about more or less valuable ideas that you want to transmit: During this first year I have written 120 posts, about 10 per month or one every 3 days… behind some of them there are hours, of thought, of calculations, of editing. But it has always been fun (as my brother said “you started it because you wanted to preach freely”).

It is fun to think about ideas, that later may or may not be translated into a post, while you are travelling, reading the paper, watching a video, etc. It is fun to see the statistics (over 8,000 visits during this first year), make calculations with them (for an average of 22 visits/day), it is fun to read and reply to comments, and even better to see someone recommending one of your posts.

There are many, yes, many other very good reasons for writing a blog.

Since some months ago I follow in Twitter and read the blog of Connor Neill, a professor at IESE business school. I had the chance to attend a workshop/conference by him at the Toastmasters District 59 Fall conference in Barcelona last November where he spoke about leadership. One of the pieces of advice he gave was to write every day for some time, be it 5 minutes, 500 words…

You may find a very good post in his blog that describes very well that part of his presentation about the importance of writing, where he gives up to 20 “starting questions to use for reflection”.

Should you start a blog? The answer is clear and concise: if you haven’t done it yet, yes.

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January 5, 2011 · 8:00 am

New Year’s resolutions vs. goal setting

During the Table Topics session of last week’s Toastmasters Madrid meeting, a friend asked one of the members whether he was the type of person that used to set goals for himself or have New Year’s resolutions.

The member was very determined in his answer: “yes, I am definitely a fan of goal-setting”. He cited a study in Harvard Business School where they found that the 3% of graduates who had written goals, and plans to accomplish them, ten years later were earning ten times as much as the other 97% put together… (it doesn’t say whether within that 3% there was a single individual, the kind of Bill Gates, who made himself just those ten times of the remaining 97%).

Then I saw a Facebook status update by another friend: “85% of my personal goals for this year – achieved.” (Bear in mind that this fellow is an outstanding individual).

Finally, two days ago I found in Twitter  a retweet of another post by Sid Savara about how to undertake a personal year-end review.

… Why not?

I decided that this year I’ll start writing down my goals and attaching a detailed plan to achieve them, instead of just thinking on January 1st of a few well-intentioned resolutions such as “learn languages”, “lose some pounds”, etc., and forgetting them by the 3rd of January. (By the way, thanks to Sergio, Javier, Alex & Conor for their inspiration).

If by 2021 I am making ten times as 97% of the readers of this blog combined, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you well in advance!

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September 6, 2010 · 12:00 pm

TEDxMadrid 2010

Last Saturday, a friend and I attended TEDxMadrid, an independently organized TED event in which several speakers presented some “ideas worth spreading” as the TED slogan goes.

The event took place in HUB Madrid, a “unique ecosystem designed to enable individuals ranging from corporate executives to community leaders, from policy-makers to entrepreneurs and freelance professionals to thrive. It is an office and events space where you can access social business ideas, innovation, knowledge, market opportunities, inspiration and experience” as they put it.

The event was streamed and the videos so far are available here. It was also funny to see the twitting activity that took place among the people being at the meeting (check #tedxmad, #tedxmadrid…).

A summary of each talk was made in the form of sketch boards by Puño & Gorriti that are available in flicker.

At the end of the event there was a short performance of impromptu theatre by “Impromadrid Teatro”, it was a funny experience. I have a friend who also has an impromptu theatre company in Madrid, “Impronta Compañía de Teatro Espontáneo”, I must go to one of their performances!

I still have to mentally “re-work” many of the things we heard and saw, and look for the many webs, books and ideas that were raised. Nevertheless, in this post I already wanted to share some thoughts that I took with me:

  • Slavery. It was commented by Antonella that in the last TED she learnt about “Free the Slaves”, an organization that liberates slaves around the world… slaves in the XXI century? We hear about women obliged to work as prostitutes or children working in some hidden factories… but when I heard the figure 27 million of them, I was shocked.
  • To be exponential in our thoughts. Alberto Dubois showed in his talk how evolution is exponential (human evolution, computing evolution, genome decoding evolution…) but we are normally linear in our thinking. We may apply the “exponential” way of thinking to many other fields, think of it.
  • BRINKs. We all have heard about the BRICs (the term coined by Goldman Sachs to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China) or the PIGS (the term coined by Anglo-Saxon economists, used by FT, to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain – lately Ireland and Great Britain as well), Alexander van de Putte introduced the BRINKs. This term refers to Brazil, Russia, Iraq, Nigeria and Kazakhstan, the countries which increased oil production will defer (once again) the estimates for the peak oil.

Finally, I wanted to thank C. Todd, Javier, Derek and Antonella for the great effort they have put into this event.

For those of you who could not attend this event but would have wished to do so, be aware that a similar event will take place in a month from now in Madrid, TEDxSol, on October 5th.

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June 18, 2010 · 8:00 am

District 59 Conference: a Learning experience

Two weeks ago I attended the Toastmasters District 59 Conference, “Springtime at the Beach”, in The Hague. This was the first time I attended such a conference, and I was impressed at the level of the speakers and the organization of the conference itself.

Being an Area Governor, for me the event lasted two days and half, starting on Friday June 4th afternoon with an executive committee meeting, following with the start of the conference, later the evaluation contest and a party with divisions showcase. That wasn’t a slow start.

On Saturday we had some workshops, the elections of new officers and the international speech contest. The way the conference, workshops and elections are held reminded me very much of my time at AEGEE and how there the Agorae were held; even some of the topics covered are similar, the way sometimes the focus is put on the procedure and not on listening at length to what the candidates plan to do if elected, etc…

On Sunday we had more workshops and the training for the new district officers (namely Division and Area Governors).

International Speech Contest. This is the main attraction of the event. We could say that we paid the 135€ fee of it to attend this contest. We had 10 speeches, one representing each division. As I wrote above, the level was very high. I couldn’t see a clear winner; a prove of that is that only one of my 3 favourites came among the 3 first ones. The winner, Na Elom Amouh, told us about his journey from Togo to Munich and how we should never give up in the pursuit of our dreams. A motivational speech. In general, most speeches in these competitions tend to call the audience for noble purposes, inspire good behaviours, etc. I must admit that some of those speeches do get to move you.

Evaluation Contest. Here, the participants had to evaluate a very good speech from former District Gov Christopher Magyar. This is not an easy task, as it is always more difficult to find points of improvement. Even though in this contest the level was very high as well, with very analytical and encouraging evaluations, this time my 3 favourites came in the first 3 positions, the winner being Tara Majumdar.

Miscellanea. There are many small details, side happenings, different situations that contribute to enlarge the baggage the one takes from the conference.

  • The landscape surrounding the conference letting members to relax.
  • The music being played in the plenary sessions, especially the banners parade bringing up the spirits of all attendees.
  • The chance to have meals in the terrace.
  • The wonderful garden for the gala party and the party at the beach.
  • The attentive organisers… the continuous availability of stroop waffles, coffees, etc.
  • The counting of votes behind the scenes… when each one is coming up with a different number!
  • The entertaining way in which chairs conducted the contests.
  • The experience of tweeting the event (from @TM_Madrid and @javierirastorza)…

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Learning experience. Overall, the conference is an intense learning experience. You learn how others organise officers’ trainings, set up clubs, give recognition to members, set up workshops, and use different techniques and skills in public speaking… To end this post I wanted to remark two workshops that I attended and especially liked:

  • Pecha Kucha: this is a presentation technique originally from Japan that consists of preparing a presentation that consists of 20 slides, each one lasting 20 seconds and that will run automatically. You, the presenter, can’t stop it so you need to time yourself to precisely convey your different messages when each slide is being shown. It was very dynamic and I think it’s a nice challenge to try it one day. Check out the calendar of Pecha Kucha nights in different cities around the World.

  • Youth Leadership Program: this is Toastmasters program for youngsters. A couple of Toastmasters explained how they have carried it in a school with teenagers. From what I saw, it must be a very rewarding experience, a way to give back something to society and at the same time a way to help young students improve their skills. This is also another challenge I might try one day.

Next District conference… in Barcelona; I’ve already booked my place there!

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