Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
If you think that this is impossible today, you’re...
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You’ve probably heard about a space ship hitting badly Venus or Mars, I don’t remember, because of miscalculations, right? Well, that’s everywhere. When you do your taxes, when you calculate your retirement or when you receive an inheritance. All are miscalculation errors. In construction, there are everywhere. In 1970, during the construction of the Kadena Air Base Bridge in Okinawa, Japan, engineers made a slight miscalculation. As usual… Two teams started building from opposite sides of the river, expecting to meet perfectly in the middle. But when they finally got close... one side was 2 meters higher than the other! I mean… not 1 cm, not 2 cm, not 10 cm… just 2 meters. The error? One team had used metric measurements, while the other worked in imperial units. If you think that this is impossible today, you’re absolutely wrong. If you don’t believe me, check this list of lessons learnt from my last project.
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Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
They wanted to save money. Of course. Because nothing says “excellent public procurement” like taking a complex, mission-critical system and pretending the cheap option is also the clever option. In 2007, the Queensland Government in Australia needed a new payroll system for Queensland Health. Not a tiny organisation. Tens of thousands of employees, multiple awards, complex rosters, allowances, overtime, penalties, shifts… The kind of payroll system that makes normal payroll systems cry in...
Let’s say you want to get in shape. You can buy a gym membership. Fine. You pay the fee. You get the little towel. You walk in pretending you know exactly what you’re doing. Then you start lifting weights like a chicken “sin cabeza”… no head. A machine here. Some dumbbells there. A bit of treadmill because you saw someone else doing it. And then you hope willpower, motivation, and the fitness gods do the rest. Good luck with that. Now, if you’re serious… Really serious… You hire a personal...
The dream accomplishment is not a promotion. Sorry. I know LinkedIn wants you crying in front of a cake with the company logo… so that you produce lots of likes. “After 17 years, I am humbled to announce…” Lovely. Very touching. Very corporate. Very LinkedIn… But no. The real dream is a WhatsApp message. “Can you jump on a call? We have a problem.” That’s it. No fireworks. No orchestra. No posts in social media with 46 hashtags. Just one message. Because someone, somewhere, in a project that...