Ideas vs implementation

Hi everybody!

Back here to keep on learning from everyday news. This week our main contributor has been a little bit down so I've considered to be much more interesting to take a look to the other side of the Atlantic, to the EU. For sure you are done with all the Brexit thing. But this week the original one came back to life, the Grexit.

Greece has been in the exit gate from the EU since 2010, when the financial situation in the country made it necessary to "rescue" them by the Union. And by rescue we mean a huge loan. The conditions for this loan were so severe that they unleashed a political crisis in Greece and a first attempt to leave some years ago. This was solved with some extra time to reach the conditions, but by the end of the past year, when there was an test, turned out that our Greek friends didn't make it. So since then all the promised aids are blocked and this is leading to new problems, that could be worse in a few months and could make the Grexit happen.

Beyond the situation itself, which I don't know that well to make my mind, this is completing a picture where Brexit was the first brushstroke and where we are waiting for the second to come from Greece... or Italy or France... The EU is an excellent idea poorly implemented. And I think that, curiously, this is something pretty usual.

In EU situation, this lack of success while making the idea come truth ended to leave some room for not that good ideologies. The messages defending that all the situation is to be blamed on the foreigners, on those came from a different country, have been growing over the past months. Those messages made the favorable vote to Brexit possible and, in mostly, are the ones that made president to our beloved Mr Trump. The problem is that those messages are aimed to divide. They are aimed to grow the differences over the common points. And they may end to destroy the EU itself. The idea could disappear.

And here is where the learning opportunity lays. I insist, the idea was good, but the poor implementation may lead to kill the idea.

Do you believe that something similar may happen to us? I don't know you, but for me it's a yes. I recall a time when I was technical leader in a company. I was developing our own team and I had this idea to change the collaboration agreement that we had with another company within the group. The idea was, since this other company was from a different country, to develop as soon as possible, our local team to manage and perform the projects. This would lead us to reduced operation costs, would make us more competitive versus other companies, more agile to respond to clients needs, would create new employment in the country... they were all good news. But everything went wrong. For any reason, that don't really matter right now, it turned out that the implementation was not as successful as we anticipated. And the idea finally died. It was a good idea, but the implementation was not that good and that led to some non constructive messages to rise, and finally those messages killed the idea.

This is the reason to really watch over the implementation of the ideas. The ideas themselves may be fantastic. But it's the implementation that makes the difference. To reach a good implementation, good information is required, some analytics, team work, humility to assume mistakes and to learn from them. There are lots of conditions to put together in order to make ideas come truth with the success level they deserve.

As for our folks in the EU, we better think carefully our next steps, because the idea can be wonderful, but if we take it wrong to reality, we can take it to ruins.

I leave. Be back soon.