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You want people in a Rolls Royce
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“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce, to get advice from those who take the subway” - Warren Buffett If this sentence does not make you think for a while, read it twice. Or three, four, five times until your head blows up. This sentence contains the essential difference between an advisor and a mentor. The first talks to you from almost the academia. The second from life experience. At my MBA I thought that I’d see rich professors… but I didn’t. It was supposed that I would learn from people that made the journey I wanted to make. But they didn’t. That’s the main flaw of the education system these days. They teach you to be good employees, but not to thrive and grow personally. And worst… the system hides the fact that you must be learning… your whole life. I’m sure that you won’t see Elon Musk going to Harvard to join a course to get a pay raise or to find out how to sell more rockets, right? That’s the point. For mentoring options, I have a package for you, below.
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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 👇
The person across the table is rarely the real problem. The unresolved issue is. But once negotiations get tense, we forget that. We start blaming motives. Questioning competence. Building a case against the person. And from there, everything gets worse. Because when you turn the other side into the enemy, solving the issue becomes almost impossible. Bye, bye, partnership. The better approach is simple: Separate the person from the problem. Be hard on the issue. Clear on the facts. Direct...
January 2018. London. Whittington Hospital. A fire. It was controlled. Patients evacuated. The hospital continued operating. Crisis over? Not even close. The fire exposed a much bigger problem. There were serious disagreements. Condition of the building. The fire safety defects. Who was contractually responsible for fixing them. Etc. The NHS Trust said the PFI company had failed to remedy the problems. The PFI company disagreed. A “mis huevos” (ego battle) situation… Payments were withheld....
You opened the project on time. Construction is finished. The ribbon has been cut. The lenders are happy. The Board can finally breathe. And then operations begin. Good for you. This is what we want to be in a big project. A few months pass by, and suddenly you realize that you are handling a different kind of monster. The subcontractor starts interpreting the contract in its favour. Small issues become recurring issues. Performance reports say everything is fine, while cash is slowly leaking...