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Having conversation with people in their sixties and over gives you a different perspective to what’s the world today. Those people are my parents. Probably your parents too. Those people still shape our minds and thinking. And we perpetuate that mindset, at least, partially, in our children. Our parents lived a very different world. They could expect their companies to take care of them, or the states. Today companies can’t do that. The states are broke. The average life of a company in the 1950s was just over 60 years. Today it is less than 20 years. In 10-15 years time, this will be below 10… Don’t look at the debt of the states in the 50s and today, or you’ll feel sick. Our parents lived in a world where you could thrive in the corporate ladder. Today, no matter how high you are, that’s the path to fear and insecurity. Your brain is your only weapon. And trust me. You’re alone. No company, no state will save you. Just your brain. And for your brain to thrive, it needs to be filled with knowledge and the feeling of empowerment. Then, it needs do, do and do, to keep learning, and your freedom developing. You can read some of that path in the stories I tell below.
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Parkinson’s Law: Work fills the space you give it. “If you give yourself three years to complete something, completion will take three years.” Now replace “three” with whatever number… like eight. That’s what I keep seeing in infrastructure. Projects designed to take 8… 10… 12 years. Not because they need it. Because nobody in the room knows how fast it can actually be done. Some clients hire advisors who have never delivered a project at scale. Or with no direct experience in the type of...
There is a project that I follow even if I live now at the other side of the Pacific. It is… or it was… or it will be one day, one of the most ambitious (and game changer) infrastructure projects in the world. It was also meant to be a PPP. California High-Speed Rail The idea sounded great: Connect major cities. Reduce emissions. Transform mobility. On paper, it had everything. In reality… it had a problem. The scope was never stable… and still it’s not. Routes changed. Stations moved....
Not corruption. Not politics. Just… incompetence. A real project. $800M. In LatAm… No more details, as in this distribution list, there are too many people living in that country… Here you are the 4 red flags that would have helped you to smell blood miles away. First red flag: They didn’t understand their own project. I’m not exaggerating. They launched the RFP with: Misaligned traffic studies Outdated geotech data A design that didn’t match the environmental permits Second: They outsourced...