I keep thinking about what to research, despite of not having time to do so. I love reading, thinking and debating about many things but mainly about education, entrepreneurship and emerging economies.

What annoys me most at this moment is that something keeps telling me that I should avoid spending time on traditional social science research. Traditional scientific process leads you to spend years to prove something very close to common sense and unfortunately I don’t have patience for that.

In my opinion, in social sciences, the consequences of this established modus operandi for research are perverse, with millions of dollars and thousands of people researching things that are useless and will probably never be applied at any group of people worldwide.

During the PhD, colleagues and professors kept telling me that I should just “follow the crowd” and try not inventing crazy research topics, methodologies or theories that would invariably lead me to fail in the program.

In summary, I had to learn how to do comprehensible and (mainly) publishable research, not setting myself too much apart from prevailing theories and methodologies. You just have to protect yourself with a “great” respectable theoretical framework and lot of stupid standardized SPSS statistics and everybody will be happy with your research. In my humble opinion, this is just the perfect way to screw with science.

Findings in social sciences are too much limited in time and place to justify the effort of spending years in something not much different from what has been said. In other sciences, when you are able to prove that cell Alfa produces protein Beta if exposed to Gamma rays, you’re clearly advancing in a field. But when you discover that certain human actions have some impact on specific organizations, this finding is very limited to a certain social group in a specific period of time. If it was not, economists, psychologists and sociologists would be able to predict economic downturns, human behavior or wars, for example.

Managing education and technology became a profession to me. Studying entrepreneurship – and its father capitalism – became a kind of a hobby: understanding this period of our history. Emerging economies won’t always be there to be researched. At the end, most of the economies of the world will be very similar by 2050. I don’t want to spend 5 years trying to prove that the obstacle X is responsible for the outcome Y in country Z, when this knowledge will certainly become useless in few decades.

We have to produce fast and useful debatable knowledge about this. What’s the downside? That there are not right answers for our questions, I’m sorry. We will have to accept that the right answer doesn’t exist and all we can do is to get the closest we can from the answer, with multiple approaches.

So, for the next 10 months, if I’m lucky to keep healthy, I plan to give these three tiny steps to share with people interest in the subject: create a practical ranking for MBA students interested in investing their resources and careers in emerging economies, collaborate with a book about the Brazilian economy – hopefully with a nice chapter about “Entrepreneurship in Brazil”, and producing a couple of “crazy” papers discussing about two things I’m interested in the field:

-          The positive impact of obstacles to entrepreneurs normally perceived as negative.

-          The death of the idea as the key starting point of an innovative business.

I won’t submit these texts to antiquate 20^th century journals; I will simply share them with people interested in the subject – academics and practitioners – and then publish here for critics and consultation. I’m tired of bureaucracy.

ps: I took the picture from: http://delbertbikessouthamerica.blogspot.com.es/

I feel an energy now. I think I feel it. But which energy is that? Is that one that makes some of us to fall in love? Or is the one that makes the sunlight looks brighter than it is? What is that? I don’t speak English!

Take it easy my brother, take it easy my sister… I don’t know you! I don’t know me either. But I’m free. Or at least I like to think I am. And this makes me larger than myself. Cool! Nevermind, forget about it. Thank you Spain, thank you Madrid!

Do you really think the challenge is to start a successful innovative business somewhere? Are you kidding? If you are one of those mediocre visitors, please, leave me alone. Unless you want to talk about the real truth. Do you really want to talk about the real truth? So, try not to forget brother, sister:

Art is life.

Job is not life. Work is life. A new business venture is limited, fucking limited, basically. Not life either, just fun.

God is love. Love is art. Art is god. Engineering is nice. So is Biology. A social science like business is also nice. Art can match them all. Don’t betray yourself. Put some art in you life! Or just forget about me. I’m trying to play this thing. Viva Paco!

ieCOMMunity News: Where are you from? What is your academic and professional background? How did you come to IE?

I’m Brazilian, born in Rio de Janeiro, from a family that came originally from Portugal. I started work in the technology sector very young at 16, as a software programmer. My father worked in the sector and ever since I was a child I loved anything to do with computers. I went on to study management and accounting at university in order to help out in my father’s firm, but I ended up loving marketing, particularly everything to do with the sale of technology-related services. 

I was one of the first Brazilians to study at IE, in the year 2000. I mapped out a career plan with the directors in our company which included studying business abroad. In Brazil at that time hardly anybody came to Europe to study business. I decided to take a look at European Schools because I had a total cultural affinity with Europe. When I came here to visit some top schools I fell in love with IE because of all the schools I visited it seemed the most technology-friendly. Although I really like history, I don’t like lectures about the past, rooted in tradition. I prefer to hear about the future, and that is what I found here. 

My experience as a student surpassed my expectations and a year and a half after I graduated, while I was working here in Madrid with Telefónica, IE invited me to find a way to increase relations between the School and Brazil. That’s how I ended up going to São Paulo to set up IE’s office there in 2003. At the time there were some 2 or 3 Brazilian students at IE each year, and today there are over 50.

ieCOMMunity News: Tell us about your day-to-day at IE. What is the most rewarding part of your work? What do you like most about it?

Today, as Director of Admissions for Blended Programs and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, my day-to-day is pretty intense. I tend to place myself and everyone I work with under a lot of pressure to keep us at the forefront of our sector. 

Right now the whole knowledge industry is playing major role in all sectors, but particularly where online education is concerned. There are so many challenges and so many courses of action you can take that it is easy to lose yourself and your motivation when there is so much to do in so little time. But this is exactly what I find motivating and gratifying: being able to help IE and society as a whole by finding alternatives to improve the way we create and transmit knowledge among ourselves. 

What I like most is to be able to dream about possible solutions for these challenges and within a matter of months be able to share these dreams with other people and see the results when they have become a reality. 

ieCOMMunity News: Tell us about how you have seen IE Business School grow and evolve since you first came to work here. 

With great excitement. IE’s culture is unique, marked by its origins but not constrained by them. For instance, it is very gratifying to see that each time I go to Brazil more and more people are starting to know about IE and its values. It is something that I couldn’t have imagined in 2003, when I first arrived there full of dreams but with limited resources. 

ieCOMMunity News: What does the restructuring of IE Business School Programs mean for the School? 

The first major step was taken 10 years ago when IE decided to commit to blended education. The second major step came with the decision to continue to commit to this model, even after the internet bubble burst. I see this restructuring process as the third, very important step, taken in the direction in which thinkers in the field of education say that we should go, namely toward the possibility of offering quality education that can be adapted to meet the needs of each individual. 

Today, developing modular courses while providing a good blended education model is a logistic and academic nightmare for any large school or university. 

As the best Business School in the world in Distance Learning (The Economist, 2010), I feel that at IE we are ready to move forward with all these models (and perhaps some others). If we don’t keep raising the bar, other schools can quickly catch up. Everything moves very fast nowadays. 

ieCOMMunity News: Which programs will be restructured? What are the key features of the new MBA+ programs? 

The programs affected are some of the part-time program groups, and certainly the majority of blended programs – or online programs as they were called up until two years ago. The changes will also affect some of IE’s more traditional programs, such as the MBAs and weekly and bi-weekly Executive MBAs. Together with the blended programs, these programs will be modular, and will be divided into two groups known as the Global MBA+ and the Executive MBA+. 

The majority of specialized programs will be integrated into these MBAs. For example, the Master in Sports Management will become a +Module, known in this case as +Sports Management, in such a way that it will fit into any Global MBA+ or Executive MBA+ format. The same will apply to the Master in Sales and Marketing, which becomes +Marketing & Sales, etc. 

There will be many possible combinations of different formats, languages, specializations and networking opportunities, which will enable the student to organize him/herself to suit his/her personal and professional needs. For example, a student can opt to do the core period in face-to-face format and change to blended when they begin the +Module, or vice versa, start with a blended format and then do the program on campus. The same goes for languages. Students can start the core period in Spanish and then change to English, or vice versa. It’s amazing.

[Here I attach the first video we did to try to transmit what are these new programs about.]

ieCOMMunity News: What should we know if students, graduates or candidates ask us about the MBA+ programs? 

That both the Global MBA+ and Executive MBA+ programs are part-time and therefore compatible with their work. The curriculum of both programs combines the content of an IE Business School MBA program with the depth of a specialized program. The many customization options will permit students to adapt the program to their own specific professional needs and personal circumstances without losing the group spirit and the chance to build the kind of powerful network that is so typical of the IE experience. 

ieCOMMunity News: How will students and graduates benefit from this new structure? 

Students will begin to feel the benefits of using technology for personal and professional development purposes from day one, getting to know unique and diverse people who nevertheless have similar concerns. The personalization, the immediate applicability of knowledge acquired during the program, and the networking contacts established between professors and students will be further strengthened by the “pieces” that make up these programs. 

Hence, students will see that technology is there to help us mankind to go further not only in terms of productivity, but also intellectually and in our social relations. 

ieCOMMunity News: What about your life outside IE? What do you do in your free time?

I read lot, more and more all the time. I think that after five years reading really thick and dense books during my doctoral studies – I completed my doctorate in 2010, I now find it so easy to read books that are not academic (they look like magazines to me). I like books (and documentaries) about history, religion, science fiction and sociology. I also practice a type of self-defense called Krav-Magá, I play the guitar sometimes, and I like to travel to different places with my wife, as often as possible. 

Twitter: @neweduca

The King versus The Bourgeoisie

Let’s just check current online dictionaries and see what they have for us: the Wiktionary states that bourgeoisie “is a class of citizens who were the wealthier members of the Third Estate”. But what is this “Third State”? The Wikipedia says it was the common people of the pre-revolutionary France (read here), that is, people not directly involved with the ruling classes: aristocrats, clerics or members of the monarchy.

Briefly speaking, they were the early businessmen! At that time entrepreneurs didn’t exist yet (well, at least they were not called this way).

The case is that I was listening to some 1980′s Brazilian Rock music and this word caught my attention by being mentioned in different songs. Here you go, one example: Geração Coca-Cola, from 1985, by Renato Russo (Legião Urbana Band). I translated the lyrics. Unfortunately the only original version I found was an acoustic one (it is not a good version, I prefer the original one in punk rock version).

Quando nascemos fomos programados
When we were born we had been programmed
A receber o que vocês
To watch what you
nos empurraram com os enlatados
forced us to watch (the TV series)
dos U.S.A., de nove às seis.
from the U.S.A., from 9am to 6pm.

Desde pequenos nós comemos lixo
Since childhood we eat junk food
comercial e industrial
commercial and industrial
Mas agora chegou nossa vez
But now it is our turn
Vamos cuspir de volta o lixo em cima de vocês
We will spit back this garbage on top of you

Somos os filhos da revolução
We are the children of the revolution
Somos burgueses sem religião
We are bourgeois without religion
Somos o futuro da nação
We are the nation’s future
Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola

Depois de 20 anos na escola
After 20 years in school
Não é difícil aprender
It is not difficult to learn
Todas as manhas do seu jogo sujo
All the dirty tricks of your game
Não é assim que tem que ser
It doesn’t have to be this way

Vamos fazer nosso dever de casa
Let’s do our homework
E aí então vocês vão ver
And then you will see
suas crianças derrubando reis
your children overthrowing kings
Fazer comédia no cinema com as suas leis
Doing comedy films with your laws

Somos os filhos da revolução
We are the children of the revolution
Somos burgueses sem religião
We are bourgeois without religion
Somos o futuro da nação
We are the nation’s future
Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola

Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola
Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola
Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola
Geração Coca-Cola
Generation Coca-Cola

It was truly a great pleasure to talk to him about Economic Sociology, Entrepreneurship and Emerging Economies. Together, we almost got to the conclusion that Uruguay could arguably not be considered an emerging economy, as we discussed about levels of corruption, bureaucracy and freedom to start a business in the country.

At certain point we caught ourselves wondering if violence and corruption in many places of Latin America weren’t easier to get hidden behind the crowds of the large and overpopulated cities. Murders and corrupt politicians (I put them in the same category on purpose) get protected by the anonymity within these large amounts of people, with illegal incidents flooding inefficient courts of justice incapable to solve problems before new ones arrive.

With little more than 3 million inhabitants, Uruguay has an upper class of about 300 thousand people. These people meet each other in theaters, movies and restaurants, knowing easily each other’s family members and actions.

Honor still has its value and people don’t want to see their names used in an inappropriate way. In Uruguay, it is still better to be a respectable medium or upper class citizen than a rich corrupt “ghost” that will have to avoid facing society and have his/her family and history marked.

I was thinking about corrupt and violent countries with small populations (there are plenty) to see if this naïve hypothesis would apply but it doesn’t. So the burden of size and the freedom to do wrong things in anonymity alone unfortunately does not explain these social problems. Religion doesn’t either. Education or lack of huge social inequalities perhaps?

If we compare the capitalism practiced in most of the current developed economies of the World with capitalism practiced in the beginning of the 20th century we can clearly see the achievements of those unionized movements still in place today. People often had to work 12, 14 or even 16 hours per day just to get a miserable salary, while vacations practically didn’t exist. Capital was just as wild as current Chinese 21st century “pro-market-communists” (what a weird combination of words!) where people currently work 12, 14 or 16 hours per day without vacation (!).

If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were standing in the same place where Chinese officials built a statue for them in Shanghai, I’m sure they would go crazy :-).

With the statue of Marx and Engels downtown Shanghai

I always thought it strange – almost humiliating, let’s say – to see the statue of a Prussian philosopher and a German-English philosopher in the middle of the “World’s Central State” (China in Chinese) telling them what to do with their destiny (“Couldn’t they figure out by themselves?!?” I wondered).

So now, instead of private-capitalists making slaves out of Chinese people, Chinese Communist Party public-capitalists do it better, and systematically (much more efficient this way). Looks like we are lead to believe that this is the price that Chinese people have to play before they can exercise opinions about their destiny (a kind of “slave first, voice later”).

More non-sense hypocrisy is seen when you visit (I did it) the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing and read the founding plaque at the Party:

Sign at the entrance of the Chinese Communist Party founding place: “The founding of the Communist Party of China is the inevitable outcome of the development of China’s modern history”.

You can almost taste a scary Vendetta kind of Chinese movement coming someday, don’t you think? I’m sure the first deep economic problem the Communist Party face, they will evoke this “history” to blame somebody from abroad.

But for me, much more non-sense than all of that Chinese bullshit together is the current debate about right and left-wing parties in Europe (France, Germany, Greece and Spain, for example) and in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, etc).

Every time I see a stupid debate between #Sarkozy and #Hollande or between #Rajoy and #Rubalcabar I’m sure they are just playing roles to put people against each other for their own – or their Party’s own – joy or sake. After all, they will all have to play the capitalist game.

Some days ago I saw some flags of the old Soviet Union defending more socialist actions from European governments. I was thinking: “- Are you kidding me? Tell me, who the hell think that a hammer and a sickle still represent European workers these days?!?”

Flag of the Soviet Union

If these leftists Santa-Claus-believers think that socialism or capitalism are still something to debate about these days, at least they should update their flags with something that would make more sense to people in this continent. I even came up with a suggestion to these dinosaurs:

Newton's proposal of a new flag for nostalgic leftists

Should I still explain why I made myself a member of the Green Party?

As computers become indispensable home appliances and internet connections as basic as water or electricity (even in poorer economies), people start exercising different ways to make the difference in this intense exchange of ideas, fighting hypocrisy and irrationality everywhere.

These latest developments in Egypt, triggered by Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (@aliaaelmahdy) in November 2011, for example, made me realize again that we still didn’t fully comprehend the real power of mankind’s increasing interconnectivity.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy changing the world.

For those of you not aware yet about this case, Aliaa is an Egyptian young elite student, trying to make herself heard through this very “unconventional” way for an Islamic country: showing herself as female human requesting more voice and rights in the new post-Mubarak-dictatorship Egyptian society. She started this spontaneous movement in late 2011. As threats and reprisals against her increase, other Egyptians do the same, taking the focus away from her.

Aliaa and all young men and women following her protest by publishing “unconventional” self-portraits around that region are not only making people around the world to re-think about the role of women in society. They are also showing how Egyptian youths are leading the way towards a less hypocrite and irrational 21st century.

I am sure these young people growing up in current Egypt and neighbor countries will help the world to become a better place when they start assuming responsibilities in the near future. As I heard someone saying this week – probably quoting somebody important: “Only those who lived without freedom realize the price of it, all the others tend to forget its costs”.

And that is the problem with many Western societies these days: having things like freedom for granted is producing a massive number of idiots in these societies, probably incapable to lead anything in the future.

That’s is why I’m also optimist about this current economic crisis befalling over some developed European countries. It’s true it is making some young people simply to runaway to another countries but at the same time it’s making some other young people to question societies and its old practices.

Welcome youth’s critical thinking, from Egypt to Spain, we need you!

Last week, here in Spain, you could see movies on the TV repeating over and over the stories of Moses, Mary, Jesus and all biblical historic-mythological characters that sustain Jewish and Christian religions.

Because of that, I caught myself thinking about how we humans make so much effort to believe in those mythological mind structures. That was how I remembered one of the latest visits to my father in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. He loves geography and geology but spent the last years studying everything he can.

Well, it was during one of those visits that we started talking about Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce was a chemist and philosopher, “founder” of pragmatism and semiotics, among other amazing philosophical thoughts (Check it out at Wikipedia).

Charles Sanders Peirce in 1859.

According to Peirce, our thoughts mix together stages of belief and skepticism (doubt, questioning). The discomfort of doubt makes us naturally to search for the comfort of belief (his texts are truly works of art, read it for free in here: The Fixation of Belief).

Peirce identified 4 methods in which belief can replace doubt. Three methods were said to be rational methods, methods that depend merely on human reasoning: individual tenacity (trust in one’s established beliefs), authority coercion (an institutionalized kind of “believe or get out of here!”) and a priori (based on pre-existing concepts or fashionable thoughts of one’s era).

The forth method he named the method of experimentation, or the scientific method, where our pre-concepts have little or no influence over the object of belief. According to Peirce, we humans tend to prefer this method of fixing belief, because it allows the testing of hypotheses against demonstrable public observations.

Unfortunately, the scientific method is also developed through the constant and extensive use of the other three rational methods, making it less trustful than we would like it to be. Actually, in my father’s opinion, scientific abstractions, based on things that can’t be found in nature, can be considered as dangerous as religious thoughts if taken without the proper sense of critical reflection.

After all, the concepts behind the number zero, the infinite, the circle, the straight line, the average and all other scientific constants unseen in nature are nothing more than rationalized “scientific” beliefs.

Here is where we reach an interesting “conclusion” point in this mini 3-post debate: if you are the kind of person that believe in God(s) or the kind of person that believe in Science, in fact, you are not so far away from each other as it may appear :-).

What motivate their/our efforts? (I include myself here in the group of developing nations) What makes people to start profit-based or non-profit-based ventures there? If you simply rely on the fact that they/we are as capitalist as you, you will be incurring in a tremendous initial mistake. You won’t get their/our trust, and if you don’t get their/our trust you won’t make good business with them/us.

Here I show few superficial differences in starting ventures in emerging economies. Please, remember that these entrepreneurs were raised in the countries they started their ventures and therefore they were embedded in their local social systems. As an out-comer you would have to interpret their realities, something they did more naturally:

Always when I talk about this God issue, some people tell me that I’m dumb because there are many unexplained things around us, and therefore God exists. Well, I definitely believe that there are many unexplained things around us, but what’s the connection between those things and God? I don’t see it. Let’s take just a simple example: the “recent” case of Ram Bahadur Bamjan (the “Buddha Boy”, from Nepal). Discovery Channel could not explain how he can keep alive after being completely immovable for days:

Another constant question: Is it possible that spirits or souls exist? Definitely. Actually, I think that when a person or an animal dies, part of their energies stays present around us and even talk to us or influence us. Can that be called soul? Yes, why not? Spiritism, Voodoo, Yoruba or Candomble are really amazing and powerful things and I do think that they are based on natural phenomena that can be perceived by many of us in different ways but still can’t be explained.

“I’ve got you!” many believers then tell me, “so, you believe in God!”. What the heck! Does that justify the existence of God? Of course not. If God(s) exist(s) just because we can’t explain something, then we are screwed: there is no reason then to look for new discoveries whatsoever. Penicillin? What for? Lets all gonna die at the age of 35 due to a group of stupid bacteria just to make our God(s) (and priests) happier!