A Love Storie

Penguins are those lovely animals that in Portugal we can only see on the zoo. They can be found in several points of the globe but, unfortunately for me (because I love penguins) their natural habitats are very far away from here. ☹

From among all the animals they are the few ones that choose a partner for life, and when it comes to make that choice, females have the power!

Female penguins care a lot about having babys so they are very demanding when they have to choose the best dad for them. They use KPI´s to measure the performance of the males.

Men offer flowers to women; penguins offer stones and sticks. These are a symbol of love. Sticks prettify the nests where babies are raised and stones serves as heartfelt gifts from one penguin to another. So, as many stones a male can offer, more chances he has to conquer her heart.

Other KPI is the body fat. If males are chubby it means that they have more fat on their bodies and can warm up the eggs when females are not at “home”. 

The weight is also a very important Key Performance Indicator because females can spend long times far away from the nests while looking for food. During this long periods males cannot leave the children in order to protect them, so they will lose a lot of wight because they cannot eat, which means that if they are fat enough, they will hold on without eating until females are back, and will not die (females don’t really care if they die but what happen to the babies if they stay alone!).

A fourth KPI is the way they “sing”. The more powerful, continuous and persistent the sound is, more the penguin shows is commitment in being a good dad.

After all this demanding process , the male is finally choosen, and it´s the beggining of a wonderfull partnership for life.

When you wake up, what part of the brain are you using?

Like in the managerial decision process that uses a method of making choices, involving both quantitative and qualitative analyses, our brain works in a very similar way. In order to make the best decisions he tries to choose between relevant and irrelevant information.

Braid is divided in two parts: System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is past oriented based on experiences and assumptions, fast, impulsive and unconscious

System 2 is future oriented, rational, logical, analytic and deliberative.

In our daily life we use system one to make important tasks like getting up of bed in the morning, drinking water when we are thirsty and run away if we are in a dangerous situation. We use it 95% of the times. If we lived only using this part of the brain what happen is that we wouldn´t be able to analyze facts properly and distinguish from relevant and irrelevant information every time we need to take decisions, so we need system two to get into our subconscious model. Being analytic, slower and logical he would act like a filter. Different alternatives can be explore and better decisions regarding our acts can be better made.

The cheapest campaing ever

Working in the campaign of the President of the Republic was one of the biggest challenges that I had in my professional life.

We were a small team of five people, that in three months went to visit the 18 districts of the country with our candidate. It was a rewarding, challenging but a very hard time. With a restricted budget and not always planned costs, we couldn´t actually predict the amount of money to allocate in every campaign action that we planned, but we did our best.

Our budget was of 150 thousand euros and our goal was to have the cheapest campaign ever. Our fixed costs were: the rent of the car were my team was, and the wage of the taxi driver that took Professor Marcelo in the second car. As variable costs we had the hotels costs, meals and gasoline. After three months we spent more 29 thousand euros than the predicted budget, but we won the election.

It’s difficult to measure the revenues of a campaign, because there are no sales associated (like in a typical business). But if I could measure the success of it, it would be computed as a function dependent on the following Formula:

Success (Number of Votes) = Qt. of districts visited X Variable Costs + Fixed Costs

Variable Costs - €/district visited

Fixed Costs - €

The constitution doesn’t allow that campaigns can make profits but, if we could, in the end, I am almost sure, that we would have reach the breakeven point, because the 52% of votes (2.403 million votes) generate a total of 165 thousand euros of subsidy from the state, that the President received after being elected.