If you can’t see the video above click here.

Panama City 10 years later:

Its been about 10 years since I really got to visit Panama City and it has changed a lot. There is construction everywhere. It is really amazing how fast the city is changing.

Everything started when control of the canal was giving back to Panama. It has  created a sense of pride here and the Panamanians are stepping up to the challenge.

Cinta Costera:

The Cinta Costera was a project to extend the coastline of Panama City. It was a project to improve the highway system and build a nice park for the people in the city.

What is so remarkable about this project is the speed that it was completed. It took less then 2 years to complete. With projects like these Panama really seam to be focusing on improving life for its people.

If you can’t see video above click here.

Episode 2:

In this show we talk about making coffee in Panama. How simple machines can be very powerful and how foreigners moving to panama are effecting the job market.

We aslo talk about what its like to see a city grow up right in front of your eyes. The day after christmas my brother and I took a drive around the city of David and looked at all the new building.

Coffee in Panamas:

http://travels.cotosolutions.com/post/306163271/panamas-3rd-best-coffee-produced-by-simple

The other week we took a trip to a coffee farm here in Panama. It was interesting to see how they made it using very basic machinery. This is very similar to the way our families business started out. The people here are very resourceful and can make a little go a long way.

Despite there resourcefulness they are facing new challenges. With the influx in foreigners in the area the people who use to work in the coffee farms are moving to more lucrative jobs as maids and gardeners. This means that producing more coffee is not an option. The farmers must find ways to raise prices and pay works more.

There might be a lot of opportunities for people form developing nations to help them adjust to these new challenges.

Driving threw David:

http://travels.cotosolutions.com/post/301471266/a-driving-tour-of-david-panama

The day after christmas my brother and I drove around the city of David and looked at all the new buildings. He said that they are building so fast that sometime he does not see the building being build.

We talked about how the city is not only building new building but renovating old ones. This is helping improve the city but it can be hard for the local to adjust to all the change. Despite being a shock to see new building all the time it is helping the country and the people develop. It also makes it easier for foreigners to integrate into the society.

If you can’t see the video above click here.

Crossing the boarder:

http://travels.cotosolutions.com/post/295157950/crossing-the-border-between-costa-rica-and-panama

It can be really difficult for people here to cross the border between Costa Rica and Panama. This is a sharp contrast to the immigration lines in airports. It seams like some the governments are putting on show for the Americas and making everyone else suffer. Its not always as crazy as it was in this video but it can be very time consuming.

Shopping in David:

http://travels.cotosolutions.com/post/295522093/what-country-am-i-in

Walking through the shops in David you could hardly tell you were in a “developing nation.” The stores look like anything you would find in America and the holiday shoppers are out in force. This raises the question “Why do people here need to go to America anymore?” It use to be that to find these type of good you would have to travel to the US. Now you can get the same stuff for a reasonable price. This is just one way that Panama is rapidly developing.

This highlights the need for keeping on top of your tasks when you are not busy. However, when you do not have a lot going on you do not really need a well defined system of organization. It is important to understand that even though you do not need to a well defined system you are really practicing for when you get really busy.

Like many things in life, if you have not been practicing the skills will not be there when you need them. Weekly reviews are a great way keep on top of your tasks. Just by looking at what needs to be completed, what you are working on and what are the road blocks will help you stay focused.

It’s not always easy to keep up with but practice makes perfect.

Locating Inventory with an inventory program:

If you are going to be using a grid system, like the one we talked about earlier, you will need a way to locate the inventory items. Grid systems work well because you simply place inventory in the empty space and let the computer keep track of its location. This can save you a lot of hasle if your inventory program can track location information.

An effective inventory program will have fields set aside for location information. These fields should be flexible enough to fit your cataloging system. We suggest using numbers for columns and letters for rows but this is completely up to you. The important thing is that the program can adapt.

Location fields in an effective inventory program.

In the inventory program we created in Panama there is a is space for the column number and the row letter. You will want a program that has one or more field just for location information. If your program does not have a field for location information and you can not add one then I would consider looking into a new application.

You will want an inventory program that can adapt to your needs because no two inventory rooms are the same. You do not want to be stuck with an inventory program which was built for someone else’s space.

Up next:

Next week I’ll be going into detail about managing people in the inventory process.

This post is part of a series that make up the Effective Inventory PDF e-book. You can read more posts that are part of this book by clicking on the EffInv tag. New posts will be added every Friday, so subscribe or check back for more

Arrived in Costa Rica:

After a 3 hour delay in Houston I arrived in Costa Rica at 12am local time. I’ve had worse trips and I was just glad to be here with all my luggage.

Insights to Innovation:

Over the next couple weeks I will be doing a series of videos about life here in Central America. I will be seeing how cultural insights can help us create innovative offerings. For more on background on the project click here. On this blog I will be talking a little more in depth about some of the concepts in the videos. I have a lot of great video ideas lined up that hopefully will provide useful a glimpse into what life is like here.

Follow Along:

If you are a subscriber of this blog you will be getting some updates as I said but for more coverage check out http://travels.cotosolutions.com I will be updating this much more frequently with pictures and videos.

About the Project:

This december I will be traveling to Central America to explore the question of how cultural insights can help us create innovative offerings. We also have cultural assumptions that when challenged can lead to new offerings. I am asking people in the US and Central America questions that will highlight the cultural differences and hopefully provide insight into new business opportunities.

I think this will help social entrepreneur understand some of the cultural challenges they may face when starting a venture. It may also have value to American businesses. I have found that we here in America have cultural misconceptions that can prevent us from finding these opportunities.

How you can help:

I will be interviewing many people in person about these topics but I would love to get more involvement. From time to time I will post questions on the blog. Just a simple answer could help us find uncover something extremely valuable. The more answers we get the more it highlights cultural differences and more insights we will generate.

First Question:

How does cultural affect your business? Does it affect it at all? Are there some areas that your business struggles with because of cultural?

Join the conversation:

You can follow along on the Insights to Innovation Blog or Join our new Facebook Page.

Out of college, one of the first books I read was Tom’s Friedman’s The World is Flat. He talked about how the convergence of several technologies flattened the world and created economic growth in developing nations. Over the past 12 years, during my travels to Latin America, I was able to experience these forces at work. I got to see the sleepy country of Panama transformed into an engine of growth for Latin America. I watched as they built new roads, hospitals, and stores. I saw the power a flatter world had to raise the standard of living for the people of Panama and my family.

Last year digital technologies began to play an important role in presidential elections. Debates where broadcast on YouTube and individuals from the crowd asked questions on a national stage. Candidates from both sides tried to leverage these new tools to spread their message and raise money. Recently government agencies have opened up their data in an attempt to provide better service. There is a big opportunity to use these tools improve their effectiveness.

Beyond the economic and political changes that technology brings, it is a driving force for social justice. This is perhaps one of the most important changes to me. During the summer the government in Iran struggled to silence the voices of its people. Thanks to new inventions such as Twitter and Facebook the people of Iran were able to speak and share their experiences with the world.

I wonder what my life would have been like if these technologies existed 30 years ago. My parents were revolutionizes in El Salvador’s civil war. They fought a repressive government that was secretly backed by the US. A government that raped, killed, and destroyed the lives of many Salvadorans. A government that kidnapped children to punish its citizens. A government that did whatever it took to silence the voices of the weak.

I am not naive to think that the revolutionaries were not at fault for some of the destruction. Many of the people the they fought for got caught in the cross fire. Violence is rarely an effective means for creating real change, but it can be a last resort when there are limited options. If these technologies were available, maybe it would have been different for them. Maybe they would have had a chance to be herd on a global scale.

I do not think most people truly understand how powerful this is. Or what it means for people like my mother and father who sacrificed everything but did not have the tools to create meaningful change. In 2004 I herd this quote by a Microsoft employee. “Now anyone with a library card can be published and because of that the world has changed.” To me, that statement embodies the power of technology and the Internet. There is still along way to go but this summer showed that those voices can no longer be silenced.

While technology alone can not heal the wounds of El Salvador, they promise to bring much needed change to the world. My hope is that new innovations will make it harder for governments to get away with human rights violations and will lift developing nations out of poverty. I see a lot of potential but still so much work to be done.

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2009. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event.

In todays world we are short on both.

Take some time to do this with everything that is on your mind at this very moment. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

Feel better? You should.

This exercise highlights a key point in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Our brains are not designed to keep track of these tasks. We can easily get overwhelmed by trying to keep everything we need to work on in our heads. Writing everything we need to do frees our minds from the work storing that information.

The trick to being organization is to realize this is our weakness. Practice getting everything you need to do out of your heads and into onto paper. You will feel a lot better and have a clearer mind.