I love cork! I hate cork!

I am finishing up a quick trip to Portugal, only eight days, on behalf of Friends of Portugal. Some years ago I spent an entire August here, and learned that it was a time when the word "ferias/vacation", was perhaps only rivaled by "obrigado/thanks"in usage and appearance. With most of their European counterparts, the Portuguese enjoy their extended holidays as much as anyone. And as one hailing from the agricultural towns of Central California, the heat that the Portuguese complain about in August is typically mild to my own senses.

                      

It has been a good visit with many exciting meetings and conversations, and progress made. In the past year, Friends of Portugal has helped start a thrift shop in the town of Massamá, rented a large warehouse for furniture restoration, small appliance repair, bicycle repairs, and clothing sorting and storage for the thrift shop and local bazaars that churches hold for their neighborhoods. Each of these projects has been encouraging and we are touching people's lives in new and exciting ways. We are now working on an even more ambitious plan and set of projects for 2015 and beyond.

For Friends of Portugal, even with local multi-national leadership, our tasks, responsibilities, and initiatives typically take much longer here to get going than I am accustomed to. Sometimes even getting people to return simple phone calls takes days or weeks, and progress can be agonizingly slow. Each time I am in this wonderful country, I can experience equal parts of opportunity and challenge, calm and anxiety, accomplishment and failure, love and hate.  Let me explain.

Last year, I had the good fortune to spend a day in Napa with some dear friends as a guest of some premiere Napa Valley wineries, and enjoyed an amazing lunch, private tours of the caves, and several winemakers shared their vast knowledge of the industry, product, and personalities. During one of the talks, I asked about the use of cork in winemaking, having visited the cork museum some years ago in the south of Portugal in Silves (regrettably, since closed), and at that time had a great conversation with an employee of the long closed factory. That day I learned a great deal of a lost manufacturing process, natural and green and sustainable hundreds of years before its current vogue status emerged. 

Without hesitating, the winemaker said "I love cork! I hate cork!" He went on to explain that as a natural product and technique as contrasted to the more modern screw cap, cork was susceptible to the processes of air, time, contamination, and the uniqueness of one natural product (cork) coming into prolonged contact with another natural product (wine). And he concluded, and it was confirmed by the other winemaker, that on average 2% of all corked bottles of wine failed. Clearly, this was a significant challenge and criticism of using cork, when screw cap wine had a far lower failure rate.

But he went on to explain that cork also had the capacity to provide subtle and almost imperceptible nuances, shadings, and variations to the wine, and that cork could on occasion assist an excellent wine to become a superb wine. Thus, the "love and hate" relationship of cork was created in his mind and experience.

This is an important lesson for all of us who work internationally. When one visits a country (I think I am up to 24 or 25 in my life, not counting Kansas), one sees and experiences things that can bring out the country and people's own particular charm and peculiarities. Inconveniences can be excused and even laughed about when one is on tourist trip, especially when it can be in a country as charming as Portugal. For example, while in the U.S. we are wholly accustomed to having a restaurant modify, substitute, or customize a dish to our own likes, such things are not done in Portugal. Getting bread daily is another. The deep cultural belief that air conditioning causes all sorts of ailments another. Every country has these idiosyncrasies, and as a tourist with great fondness for this country and others, I usually have a tendency to chuckle and actually enjoy these temporary inconveniences.

However, in Portugal when one attempts to obtain a particular license, or receive comparable prices on real estate, or clarity about a particular law or regulation, it is not so simple as going online or calling a private or public office. Many of the things I take for granted in San Diego one simply cannot do so easy here. There is a pace to life here that I love and I hate--and it forces me to have greater patience than I would typically have.

There are probably few Portuguese cultural concepts that are as well known as fado. It is certainly a wonderful and unique musical form, but it is much more than that, for it serves as a philosophy of life that is within the Portuguese of all walks of life. The music and the philosophical perspective is melancholic, reflective, maudlin, fatalistic, and intrinsic. Yet it can also be a weird combination of hopeful and hopeless, and is full of love and affection and yet this is often torn away or unrealized. It can answer some questions of Portugal and yet is silent on even greater ones. 

My observation is that fado underscores both the challenges and the opportunities for long term work in Portugal. It is something that one can both love and hate. It speaks of both the Portugal of the past and the Portugal that is.  And as I look out into the future, it makes me wonder what the Portugal of the future will be.

Why Portugal Needs Entrepreneurs by Randy M. Ataíde

In the midst of what has been, from all reports and correspondence I have had, an amazing summer in Portugal for record numbers of tourists, a dark shadow has crept in amidst the sunny days full of great sights, culinary delights, and stunning history of this delightful country. And as is typical in Portugal, it has to do with the abuses of a few in powerful positions, and yet the entire country and its people is tarnished. I am speaking here of the news about Banco Espírito Santo, and what appears to be its imminent collapse.
There are few families as storied as the Espírito Santo family, whose investments include hotels in Europe and farms in South America, holding companies, and a murky balance sheet of intertwined companies across countries. Intertwined with the contemporary history of Portugal, the family has had a strong influence over Portugal’s economy for well over a hundred years, through the collapse of the monarchy in 1910, to the rise and fall of the Republic, the long gloom of Salazar, and through the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and the entry into the EU. As the highly leveraged "family business" struggles to survive, it appears that the bank will become nationalized, with the assistance of the EU banking system and the Portuguese Central Bank. 

Through all of this, the family and its empire has survived, and while the monarchy abdicated long ago, the aristocracy of the family persisted, and to some extent with its financial power and globalization, thrived. While every nation, including the U.S., has excessive power and wealth in the hands of of individuals, families, and companies, what Portugal lacks and struggles to implement is a culture of entrepreneurship. And until it reimagines what entrepreneurship is, and takes steps to create a more robust, friendly, and accepting climates of micro-enterprises both in the for-profit and the non-profit sector, it will remain overly susceptible to the abuse and neglect of the aristocracy of all sorts and shapes. 

Amidst the oft-cited reasons for fostering entrepreneurship in any country, one is often overlooked, and it is something that I have written and presented at an academic conference about--what I refer to as "the aristocracy of economics." The excessive and centralized consolidation of economic power and influence in the hands of any person, government, industry, etc., is, as history has shown, typically bad for all. Further, one should not view a "one size fits all" when it comes to economic systems and countries and regions, for there are unique elements to each setting and people should always have the freedom and liberty to choose what works best for them. History is rife with passionate advocates who replace one system with another, and simply replace the one set of powerful actors in control with another set.

All of these systems are always susceptible to being undermined and controlled by the aristocrats. And there is where entrepreneurship comes in, and why they are so important to  all of our futures, our communities, our nations. At its core, entrepreneurs disrupt existing power structures and systems, seeking efficiencies, uniqueness, and unrealized value. They wait not for the permission to do such things, nor do they typically have to cope with the organizational inertia and stagnation that larger existing entities have. They are much more free to fail, to "dust themselves off" and to try again, learning more from the experience and not letting it define who they are.

When aristocrats consolidate their power, and inherited wealth is freely passed to generations who have no knowledge, experience, and conception of the struggles of the lower and middle classes, one sows the seeds of disaster. That is one of the main reasons why billionaire investor Warren Buffett has refused to transfer his wealth to his children, and some other mega-rich families are agreeing to follow his example. This approach to inheritance would likely diminish the examples of those like Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva Salgado, the family patriarch and former head of the bank, who was arrested this past week in Portugal and charged with tax evasion and money laundering.

The good citizens of Portugal, and other countries as well including the U.S. and northern Europe, need to learn from these lessons. There are some nascent steps being taken within the EU, such as the Go Conference held earlier this year in Lisbon, fostering and stimulating young entrepreneurs. There are new programs and advocacy groups for entrepreneurship emerging, both within and outside of formal education in Portugal. These are all hopeful signs.

We need to seek more ways in which these young people, and young thinking people of any age, can reimagine and disrupt their own enterprises, ventures, churches, economies, political structures, not for the mere sake of change, but rather to foster new growth and prosperity for all.

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Surprise and Progress in Portugal by Randy M. Ataíde

In May 2014, my wife and I returned to Portugal, which is I believe my 12th or 13th trip there in the past ten years. Each time I journey to Portugal I am surprised by unexpected experiences, something I likely share with many visitors to this wonderful land. Of course, there are the great meals, the spectacular scenery, and the amazing history. These blessings seem to be never-ending, but I don't take them for granted.

Throughout this past decade, I was a witness, albeit at a distance, to the spectacular ascent, plateau, and then rapid decline of the economy in Portugal. Malls that were once full of shoppers strolling arm in arm with loaded bags of new purchases grew quiet, with only the food courts remaining busy. Portuguese people I know and care deeply for have lost their jobs, pensions have been slashed, the austerity painful and prolonged. Many of us in North America can hardly relate to what the Portuguese have endured, usually in a dignified silence shaped by a deep cultural mythology of fado. From my observations, the Portuguese have assigned primary blame upon themselves and their choices of leaders, something that perhaps we in North America could learn from.

Now, it appears that this long dark period may be slowly coming to an end, for there is indeed some "Progress in Portugal." I will write more upon the unique Portuguese response to this hopeful turn of events in a coming blog post, but for the moment I want to return to a more personal story and experience, a surprise, a blessing, a moment I am very grateful for.

When we arrived in Portugal in May, we discovered that a group of young Canadians had been in the country for a week or so as well, on a short term service trip from several churches. They were an eclectic group--some were quiet while others were outgoing; one would be fairly clear and determined in life plans and goals and perhaps another was in a process of searching. They were wonderfully alike and yet preciously distinctive.

Unbeknownst to the Canadians, they arrived at a time when the non-profit group I am grateful to be a part of, Friends of Portugal, was making some important decisions related to various projects and initiatives. (For more details on FOP, see www.friendsofportugal.net)  National leadership for FOP had written a feasibility study for several micro-projects designed to renovate vintage furniture and household appliances, the first phase of a more comprehensive vision of FOP to develop skills, job training, and self-sufficiency for the Portuguese. In less than 48 hours after our arrival, FOP succeeded in leasing a 2,500 square foot warehouse in an ideal location to support its various projects, and began to secure additional equipment such as storage racks, tools, and even a delivery and service van for FOP.

For many years I have often been in the role of decision-maker and leader in a number of ventures and businesses, and my observation is we typically get too much credit when things go really well and conversely we shoulder too much blame when things go poorly. But in this particular instance, despite whatever role I may have had in any decisions, the real credit goes to others in the supporting roles. And for Friends of Portugal and the leasing of this new facility, these young Canadians provided critical support at the exact time that it was needed. Their youthful enthusiasm, creativity, physical strength, and willingness to do the unglamorous work necessary to any enterprise was an enormous blessing and necessary injection of energy. Watching them sorting through hundreds of boxes of clothes, carefully examining and folding each piece, or young men jumping into the back of a storage van and "man-handling" appliances that can cause us older "lions" to chew Tylenol like chewing gum, is a source of deep appreciation, affection, and most importantly for all of us, hope.

Often, when young people contemplate doing some form of service on behalf of a community group, social enterprise, church, or other non-profit, they can approach such activities as "mountain top experiences" where results are palpable, quick, and gratifying. I don't know many who think of folding clothes for many days, or cleaning and sweeping an empty warehouse, or playing a simple game of football with some neighbor kids, as worthy of traveling thousands of miles at great expense, with accompanying inconveniences.

But these are the steps of progress that need to occur not only in the working out of our own lives and careers, but also in the lives of an entire country such as Portugal. Too often we want to focus upon a dramatic and colorful "breakthrough" but the reality is that these rarely can occur without a great deal of behind the scenes service, sweat, and toil.

So yes, we can say that there is "Progress in Portugal" just as much as we can say there is progress in the nonprofit Friends of Portugal. But this progress comes when one is blessed--even surprised--by the willingness of others to step in and provide help when it is most needed. This is what these young Canadians did in May and June of 2014.

If the Portuguese youth are similar to the Canadian youth I met this spring, then one can indeed be hopeful that there are good days ahead for Portugal. And in my heart that pumps  blood from my Portuguese ancestors, I believe that these are signs of good "Progress in Portugal."