Friday, October 30, 2009

Entrepreneurships: the new way to cope with global opportunities.

The month of November will be full of activities around the world concerning entrepreneurship .Between November 16th and 22nd, there will be events world wide to discuss the nature ,implications ,and prospect of entrepreneurship.
What is the meaning of entrepreneurships?. In a nutshell, means an attitude toward opportunities arising both from internal and external markets forces. The internal market forces, deal with the environment within firms which might be plenty of opportunities to take action on, but no all of its human capital is ready to do so because they lack the will to go for it. Some examples: Computer network, allows everyone to get access to data and information ,in such amount sufficient enough to build up an internal service platform(birthday greetings ,firm commemorations, data analysis for innovation applied on management and productive process, share value added services center ,customer services ) which might influence decisively the job performance, both in terms of social interactions and results. The only requirement to go along with it, is to have a the willingness to go for the difference .
In other words, it is required intrapreneurship , which is different from entrepreneurship, because the latter deals with the external markets opportunities, while the former deal with the internal markets. Business needs intrapreneurship , more than just employees doing he same all the time , trapped in the routine of changing nothing, to get over with the standard of value added which actually apply to the allocation of resources .
Entrepreneurships , is also important because it deals with the way people within a community, face the chance of doing something better and different, with the same resources available for everyone, but which otherwise would be wasted or unproductive. Even more, it would allow to create wealth.
At the core of entrepreneurship is to solve business problems with an approach based more on individual strength, than other based on external support or luck. Entrepreneurs stories are all based on the ability to pursue what others are not willing to go for, not necessarily because they do not want to, but mostly because they do not believe in. Strength ,faith, willingness , attitude are all mixed on both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. These input are the source of innovation, change and wealth creation.-
Behind great ideas there have been the seed of entrepreneurship. Burger King, Mc Donald, Amazon, CNN, Apple, Facebook, Twiter even our boss Google, are all the outcome of geniality mixed with passion, focus and tenacity to get what these entrepreneurs really believed in .-
Chile is also working on this subject .Just in November there will be 7 events related to entrepreneurship ,from north to south. In the end of the nineties, there were in Chile more than 1 million of entrepreneurs ,which outpaced the rate of entrepreneurship as a proportion of total population, of countries like Japan. Thus, entrepreneurship has become the input to mobilize energy toward a global scale of wealth creation.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

BLOG ACTION DAY



Climate change threat : A requirement for a more efficient use of resources.

The whole world is looking for better answers to climate change. Copenhagen will be at the core of the matter next December , when the industrial and emerging economies will start to work at it. Let make a short introduction to the state of the art.
Although it seems an urgent issue ,which suggest that nobody care about it, the climate change discussion has made a decisive progress in the last couple of years, such that is not a back stage (secondary importance) problem anymore, but it is a front page problem which need to be addressed firmly. Thus, beyond the Kyoto protocol and its results, it has gotten the attention of key leaders. The Catholic Church and the Pope Benedict XVI, has made a call just a couple of year ago, for better protection of environment .This was a breakthrough step, given the fact that the religious beliefs do not have a clear focus on environment ,and the way the human specie deal with what it might be considered the God Property. The Nobel committee ,also said a word in 2008 , with Mr Al Gore as the laureate with the Nobel Piece Prize recognition.
Besides, world political leaders, The United Nations, the global news media, Non government organization, even celebrities from different fields, are all engaged in this challenge of controlling the pace which human specie make its way toward economic progress, keeping the delicate balance with nature and the environment.-
It follows that this BLOG ACTION DAY, should not be a day of sorrow, but a day of hope and expectations. Something is changing, and we should realized the scope of that change . Therefore , the next step is to identify the primary issues which come along to define priorities in this age of environment constraint.
On top of the list, it is the new concept of efficiency. From the economic point of view ,efficiency deals with minimize the monetary cost involved in the process of transforming input into output. With the environment considered to be a “free good”,(it means no price was needed to get that resource ) ,it was not include in such calculations. In fact, most of the countries measure of GDP increases, without considering the impact of such increase in the environment ,which at this moment might be negative. Thus ,this new concept of efficiency must be applied to every transforming action, into the whole productive chain. Actually, the main activities adding up pollution and dioxide emissions are :Electricity companies (23%),Industry ( 16,8%),Transport (14,0%),Agriculture (12,5%), Resources Exploitation(11,3%), Residential consumption (10,3%),Garbage (3,4%),others ( 10%). Almost 78% of dioxide emissions come from productive activities, not efficient enough in its productive process. It follows that Electricity which is in the first place, has become the priority for new sources of efficiency. So, let concentrates on that. There are already some interesting approach, like the “Smart grid electricity” source of energy power , which has been developed by Siemens (http://www.siemens.com/) , promoted at the “Meeting trade show” in Europe from October 6 ,up to October the 8 , in Barcelona .
We all face the challenge of getting the attention on environment issues, but also it is the time for focusing on productive sectors called to improve their efficiency standards. This is the challenge in the coming years.

Friday, October 02, 2009

Politics and global economy

Following Paul Johnson, Politics and politicians became important after WW II, because there were important issues to solve peacefully among different partners. The negotiation table was the new scenario, to solve what the battle field left unsolved. These days, the global financial crisis and its impact , is the equivalent to the economic battle field , and also there are important issues unsolved which requires a rather politic approach. Some of these issues are global financial regulation ,CEO compensation payments, Management models concerning risk taking , rating agencies performance and the like. None of these topics, concern to just one economy, it concern to the global economy .
The global economy is more risk averse, than each of the economy it includes. In other words , the real problem concerning global economy performance are not the one related to the real economy (trade), because the current link between consumption and production make unthinkable the option of protectionism , but the current instantaneous financial capital links is what has becomes a more pressing issue. A recent IMF report indicates that the transmission speed of the September 2008 financial crisis, was higher than past experiences because of these links. Therefore the new issue to solve, deals with the kind of financial regulation feasible to apply to a global scale, than what to do about cheaper imports .Why is it so?. Physical Capital mobility make protectionism a short lived option. Governments might set either quotas or taxes, but it can not set physical barriers to new investments coming in . Whereas unregulated financial flows might deteriorate the foundations of consumption and production links when exchange rates react to such a flows. Both Depreciations and appreciations are not risk free for each individual economy. In fact, These flows might be the main source of output variability in the global economy , as long as it might affects strongly the real side of each of the economy it includes .
Thus, while some analysts might have thought that the importance of politicians was decreasing , politicians and politics are back again on the world economic stage. The G-20 is a very good example of this came back .It replaced the traditional G-8, because there is a new world allocation of economic influence. The emerging economies have gotten its place in the global economy , because after all are among the main loser when it comes to capital flows and its effect on the domestic economy.
An interesting point deals with the fact that it is not just any kind of politics. Voters, which after all are the employers of politicians, have already said in some countries which way they prefer to go through in terms of policies focus . It might be strange but in some of these cases (Germany),they have preferred a conservative pragmatic market based approach ,instead of a more liberal stated based approach .How is this possible? . First of all, right and left politics do not mean the same as they did just a few years ago(1990). Services have replaced manufacturing, and the new manufacturing is based on automatic process and robotics, which require more skilled labour force. Low skills workers, do not have chances to support redistribution policies, because they have been replaced by machines and robots. Thus ,the traditional left, has lost its core message. The new workers are more aware about their tax payment, and therefore more conservative with taxes allocations, because they earn higher incomes or expect to get so in the short run. Is this a trend? It might be so, although each economy has its own social and productive structure. However, Brazil and Chile are in Latin America at least, good examples of this change about the new focus concerning political orientation .Pragmatism is the path for this new era of politicians.-