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I am Jewish and I can’t understand why attacking Iran over the threat of nuclear is a great idea. It’s not that I believe what Iran says. Of course they will develop nuclear weapons, but also Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And Pakistan is a very unstable country and we live with them and their weapons. And India, a country which most of us find easier to live with, has had to live with Pakistan, their weapons and their terrorists.

Pakistan is a country ruled by people who like us but populated by people who mostly hate us, and I don’t mean hate Jews, but the whole West, India and China. Polls show that in the mid 00s most Pakistanis liked Bin Laden as a leader. And some clearly liked him enough to give him shelter for so many years. And this is a country has nuclear weapons and we tolerate it. And Israel and maybe EU and USA are planning to go to war with Iran because they may have nuclear weapons and be where Pakistan is today. Going to war with a country because it will have nuclear weapons is hardly a way to increase world security. Why didn’t USA go to war with USSR when they developed nuclear weapons? Why didnt we go to war with North Korea whose lunatic leadership is far worse than the Iranian leadership. In each of those circumstances we estimated the cost of war to be greater than the cost of preventing nuclear proliferation. North Korea for example, could already wipe out a third of South Korea with conventional artillery, in the face of that threat, we let them go nuclear. I am sure the South Koreans would prefer another neighbor, but they do what they can given the circumstances. Even after a nuclear Iran, Israel’s situation won’t be as bad as that of South Korea at war with a nation that borders it and can destroy it with conventional and nuclear weapons and threatens to do so very frequently. Plus Iran is a threat to Israel already through its proxy armies of Hezbollah and Hamas. But Syria was partners with Iran and another serious threat to Israel under the leadership of Bashar Al Assad and look at where he is now, exterminating his own people, hated by his own people. Qaddafi said there was going to be a Middle East without Israel and we ended having a Libya without Qaddafi. I think there is enough evidence that Iran is going in the same direction. Preventive warfare is flawed. It’s a doctrine that says that because you may not like war in the future you start a war now. We squandered trillions of dollars of USA and EU money with this doctrine, and precious human lives, and achieved nothing. Anyone doubts that Saddam Hussein would have survived the Arab uprisings? If we intervene we should so so to tip the balance, not to go as an invasive force trying to conquer, police and rebuild a nation for a decade. It’s wrong and we can’t afford it.

Nuclear weapons have this weirdly positive aspect to them that their utilization is so serious, so incredibly harmful, that those who have them so far in history have stayed put. It’s as if their owners developed a deep sense of nausea just about having them. The only exception in history, is of course USA, who whether we like it or not, was the only nation brutal enough to overcome their nausea and use them. Probably because nobody had used them before and the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not on anyone’s minds.

I think that we should all put more hope in the people of Iran. Iran is the opposite of Pakistan, a country ruled by people who hate us but populated by people who are fed up with them and like us and our lifestyle. Every protest in Iran seems to be about people who want to be free and a government who puts them down. So we should not give these freedom seeking people who almost overthrew Ahmadinejad, a real reason to hate us. And let’s remember that under attack everyone becomes a nationalist and sides with whoever is the dictator who rules the country. From a Jewish point of view, now that the Muslim world is finally focused on their problems attacking Iran would be to go for the limelight at the worse possible moment.

We should accept that this situation is ugly, confusing, tough to deal with and there no easy answers. And for Israel attacking Iran a country of 80 million people that is twice as big as France and far away is a daunting task, nothing like the Operation Babylon of 1981. Israel, USA, EU, should continue with covert operations and other tactics that are short of war, and put all sorts of pressures to show how great life would be for all if Iran stops. But at the same time we have to learn to live with our fears, accept that Iran may go nuclear, and focus on promoting a change of leadership that is more aligned with the Iranian people and our interests.

My answer generally centers around the fact how I have a great team of managers, that they are so good and reliable, that Fon has an amazing pool of talent, I also talk about how much I delegate, and that is all true.

There is another side to this question that I have not told journalists.  I have not done it because I fear sounding obnoxious, or elitist, or just weird.  But this is my blog so if I don’t do it here where else?  So here’s the other answer, the more private answer of how I have managed and manage my time.  Some of these tips are probably useful to you so here they go.

-I almost never watch TV, that seems to consume 20 hours a week of the average person. If I watch anything it’s Netflix or Youtube, that’s where I get my TV content and movies from.  I also rarely go to movie theaters and watch all movies in our home theater with the family.

-I am not interested in professional sports, another activity that seems to consume endless hours of many people including most of my guy friends. Like yesterday was the Super Bowl, and it went unnoticed to me. I only watch the World Cup and that is once every four years.  Not watching sports, nor commenting or talking about them, is a real time saver.

-I read few books, I just don’t have 30 hours to devote to each one of them.  I read a lot on the net however, and some magazines and short stories during flights.  But just like I practice sports much more than I watch sports (I cycle around 8 hours a week) I write much more than I read. I read a lot in my 20s, now it’s my time to contribute to others.  Yes I did read the Steve Jobs bio, or some Nick Hornby, Martin Amis recently. But reading whole books takes too much time for me to be able to do it on a daily basis.  I wait to go on vacation for that.  I read when I sail.  That makes a perfect combination for me.

-Personal grooming: many top business people spend a great deal of time selecting their clothes, getting haircuts, manicures, pedicures, massages, and all sorts of time consuming personal grooming activities. I instead sometimes cut my own hair, dress simply, wear sneakers and jeans, never wear ties or suit. Also I don`t spend much time shopping, almost everything I buy, I buy online.

-Logistics and commute (this part is only useful for entrepreneurs): I sometimes drive, but I have a driver and while I go anywhere I work in my car. This is clearly a luxury but it is a time saving luxury. Also by design my home is 10m from my office and 20m from the airport also near my kids schools. When I travel,  we have homes in New York, Paris and London.  This is partly because I don’t like to pack nor check in hotels, in those homes I find all I need.  I can go in and out quickly. I also have another special luxury which is a small private jet and therefore spend much less time at airports and travel more efficiently around Europe, (my plane does not cross the Atlantic). Private jets are clearly a luxury but small jets that fly less than 4 hours cost 1/10 of what large jets that cross oceans cost. They do have an environmental footprint and have I have built a lot of wind farms to pay for my sins

-Even though my company’s name is Fon I rarely make phone calls.  I communicate over every imaginable platform, bbm, whatsapp, skype for chat, google talk, you name it, but phone calls are mostly for family and friends . In business  I prefer electronic media or in person meetings.  It is asynchronous and leaves a record. That also saves me an hour a day compared to others.

-I don’t drink. Yes this one is a shocker but I rarely drink, if anything a glass of wine with a meal. I dislike beer and liquor. Drinking is something that consumes an incredible amount of time in the lives of other people and renders them useless for a lot of other activities for a significant percentage of their lives. Not drinking has put me in difficult positions doing business, especially in Japan or Northern Europe, but it’s not that I am against it, it makes me want to puke!  Same with drugs, I tried many, but didn’t like them.  And cigarettes, cigars, I haven’t smoked a whole one in my life, only a few joints and that was not a success either. Being sober at nights, on weekends, already puts me ahead of most of the population!

-I rarely do business lunches and dinners and spend most meals with family and friends who I really care about. Business meetings are at the office and in the morning. I work from 9 to 2. Afternoons are for family,  and sports. Evenings for family and friends. My  business meetings instead are invariably short.  I am always online and work online. But I don’t like to be at the office just for being at the office. When I am at Fon, my door is open and people can walk in for short meetings.  People at Fon know that I treasure my time, but they also know that I am there every time I am really needed.

-I am punctual and have little patience for those who aren’t.  I don’t make others wait, I don’t wait for others.  The word must have gotten around on this because we all tend to be on time.

-I make social media work for me, sometimes people say, how do you get work done if you spend so much time on social media, but I use social media to take notes, like I have an idea for a business and I blog it, I share it, I work collectively with people, social media looks like a waste of time for others but it saves me time, I recruit on twitter, I brainstorm on Google+ or my blog, I work inside social media, get ideas, its a sanity check many times, crowdsourcing saves me time. When tweeting I use tweetdeck to time my tweets so they appear at different times of the day when I am doing other things. This allows me to tweet across time zones although sometimes it angers people when they think I don’t answer and I am asleep. I also developed an Android app to listen to my social media on my bike. It’s called Radiome and it reads your social media while it plays music, it’s perfect for my bike.

-against what many think I sleep and I sleep well, 8 hours or so. Sleeping is an important time of the day. I sleep much better with my wife than alone when I travel without her. Lately I sleep with our 5 month old baby and I still manage to sleep reasonably well because we are lucky enough to have a baby who sleeps 11 hours almost every night. She sleeps much better than my older kids and I think it’s because we adopted co sleeping.

-lastly I say no to a lot of formal invitations, events, dinners and business meetings. I see time as sailors see wind, or photographers see light, as something to use, manage, and shape, not as something to be a victim of, or to see go by.

And yes, I do have a great team of people who work for me and help me out and I am very, very thankful for what they do.

PD there’s a shorter version of this article and a debate as well in Google+

I agree that in the South of Europe there was a lack of reform and a great deal of waste. In Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal a lot of privileges were given to people who did not deserve them, growth was built on credit, and the economies collapsed as a result. There was and there is corruption in most of Southern Europe, more than in the North, and many white elephants were built, airports that are not used, high speed train lines that are not needed.

But a drastic stop to a lot of economic activity without reasonable alternatives to generate growth will only exacerbate the problem. This is happening in Spain right now. We are cutting spending, we are not focusing on intelligent credit creation and we are making many viable businesses suffer or die of credit starvation. We need to create emergency credit lines for all businesses who are hiring. We have to find the pockets of growth and support them. We can’t indiscriminately cut spending.We have to move workers from dying industries to growing industries, we have to reeducate the population for the globalized economy of this century.  The challenges of evolving from an industrialized economy to a service economy are not new, but now we have to deal with the challenges of evolving from the service economy to the digital economy.  None of these problems are financial or monetary, they are real and require real intervention.  Fiscal tightening is akin to chemotherapy, we can’t kill all cells because some are bad. We have to have a smart bullet approach to economic intervention.  Which if you think about it this is what Germany did to itself.  Because Germany is making the same mistake as the large shareholders of the IMF did.  They applied for themselves much more elaborate and detailed growth policies that worked and ask Latin America to implement simplistic, “chemo” type policies.  The results were disastrous.

Germany is doing to Southern Europe what the IMF did to Latin America for decades and this is dangerous for Germany and Southern Europe. In Latin America by preaching austerity at all cost the IMF created failed policies and a decade of stagnation. Moreover as its failure became apparent the IMF ended up being mostly hated by Latin Americans and around the world. Germany could end up in the same spot. This would be sad because in the end we all know that Germany means well, it is just applying the wrong economic model as the IMF did.  The USA, closely associated with the IMF lost most of Latin America sympathy in the last 15 years. It is sad to see how many Latin Americans now think that China is a better country and economic model than USA and have emulated China with regimes such as that of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. Same could happen to Germany and the German model if it insists in implementing wrong policies. The European Union could fall apart and Southern Europe could end up experimenting with populist political regimes that only make the whole situation for Europe much worse.

There’s an active debate on this post in Google+ you may want to comment here.

One of the reasons Latin America is doing better this decade is because a lot of its elite has been educated at the best universities in the world, mostly in the US. One example is Marcos Galperin who built Mercado Libre into a multibillion dollar market cap Nasdaq giant, something that I think would have been hard for him to do without a US education. And there are many, many others. For decades now the Latin American elites were educated in the US and now they are finally in charge of the most productive sectors of the local economies.

Maybe Spain should do the same. The Spanish education system kills the imagination of the best and brightest students. I know this because we have had to re educate many of these students at the companies I started in this country including Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon. We have companies that are also universities in a sense, whose graduates go and build other companies that are more in tune with the digital era.  There are some exceptions, especially in business studies with IE and IESE ranking very well globally but the average education available to Spaniards is very mediocre with no Spanish Universities in global rankings.

Now it so happens that it is not that expensive to send Spanish students to study abroad. Some Spanish corporations already give grants for this. Indeed just today I signed a recommendation letter for a Fon employee to study at Stanford partly financed by Caja Madrid and I hope they take him. But this could happen at a much more massive scale if the focus was Northern Europe. Studying in the UK with a pound at 1.19 is not as expensive as it used to be. Tuition is low for the quality of education they give. Indeed you can get a whole education in the UK for the cost of a year of studying in the US. Sending thousands of Spanish students to study in the UK, in the Netherlands, Germany and other Northern European countries who are doing better than Spain, could be a way to leapfrog many of the antiquated and dated Spanish professor body who with some notable exception is destroying a generation of Spaniards.  It is also a good investment since education runs a big deficit and an 18 year old who studies abroad gains this education.  Yes, there is a risk that they may stay but if they do it is not brain drain which is what happens when a country invests in a university education, as India many times does, for the graduates to end up in the US or other nations.

We live in an era in which industrialization is being superseded by digitalization, and Spain is not ready to educate its population for this change. The result is the highest unemployment rate in the OECD: 22%. A structural unemployment that is based on a misfit between the skills of the population and the jobs available in the marketplace. There is no unemployment in the tech sector in Spain, but there are not enough highly educated candidates for those jobs. We have to fix that and fix it before this country falls apart. Sending our best and brightest abroad could be part of the solution. We can’t wait for the education system to be fixed. Not with the lifetime jobs that we have provided to the mostly incompetent and untrained professors who populate it. And this is not true of Spain alone but of a lot of Southern Europe.

Here you can see the video. The story would be as follows: Jean has a dog called Fifi that barks when she finds a wifi hotspot, because of Fon and its agreement with Belgacom, this virtue has turned out to be his worst nightmare as she never stops barking.

The first one was that babies born through C-section suffer trauma because they were never hugged and said goodbye to their mother.

Another one was that babies conceived via IVF can never get to love their father and mother. No comment was made about the ones that are both conceived via IVF and born via C section but you can only guess how sorry she feels for them.

So by then she had hurt without reason maybe around 20% of all babies in the planet but that was not enough. She went on to insulting the rest of the planet by saying that we don’t need to wait for nuclear war so only the cockroaches survive because us, humans are the cockroaches. And she went on to explain her point.

In the end she changed her tone and said a lot of positive things about humanity, she even said, “all you need is love“. But I guess if you are an IVF conceived baby love is not enough, as you will not love your parents.

Eli Yishai via Wikipedia

It is also understandable how Europe, which is mostly secular, feels alienated from Israel now and USA which is mostly religious, identifies with the country. Israelis like to say that Europe is just anti semitic but while some of that is true, especially Spain (google “es dificil ser judío en España”) what is also true is that in Europe no politician speaks about God in general and least of all as if God liked Jews and not Muslims. Personally I think there is a very low probability that God exists but even if it did there is a proportionate lower probability that it belonged to any religion. I think that God in itself is an extremely unlikely entity but it did exist what would be the link between God and one particular religion? To me God inside a religion is a flag that some carry to do good but most carry as a symbol of their own tribe against others. In many cases God inside a religion is used to justify murder and that makes religion alien to me.

Long are the days of Israel being led by agnostics or atheists like Golda Meir who when asked if she believed in God she said. I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God. Now Israel is being led by people who think God is on their side. Pretty dangerous.

If you don’t live in Spain and you come here and go around you would be surprised. Spain is actually a wealthy country in global terms and it doesn’t look poor when you travel around here. But since the construction industry collapsed unemployment grew from 8% to 21%. Basically all of those who worked in that industry are having a very hard time finding a new role in the economy for themselves. The collapse of real estate had a tremendously negative multiplier effect. It is a huge part of the population that is in such bad shape and it will probably take a decade for unemployment to go down to where it was in 2008. In the meantime initiatives like this help alleviate the pain of those who have fallen into poverty.

Apreciado Martin,
me defraudas con este post. Con opiniones como la tuya nos evitariamos investigaciones de accidentes tan tediosas y ..sin importancia.
Te crei con algo de “sentido comun”, pero ya sabes lo que dicen, que “el sentido”por ser “comun”, nos toca a muy poco a cada uno.
Un poco de rigor y respeto; y no subir el trafico de tu blog a costa de desgracias de este tipo.

But after a long investigation I was right.  The pilots took off without flaps which is an incredible mistake to make, but humans are humans and we make mistakes. Planes should simply not take off without flaps and many don’t. I don’t blame the pilots fully in my post because I think engineering should have prevented this.

Well the same is true with cruise ships.  Engineering should have and could have averted this tragedy by not allowing ships to come close to coast lines without warnings.  Ships should also have ways to turn themselves when they are in collision course with land.

Before the investigation this is what I think happened (and of course I may be wrong).  I believe that the captain of Costa Concordia steered into the Island of Giglio.  You can see this from Marine Traffic.  I think the captain lies when he says he hit an uncharted rock while he was at a safe distance from the coast.  Instead he collided with the coastline either because he was just not at the helm or else because he was at the helm and wanted to show off his steering skills by going very close to the island of Giglio, but he then came too close and ran aground.  You can see the coastline in detail if you download a software called Navionics Mediterranean in your iPhone, Android or iPad. I have it because I sail and I am the skipper of my own sailboat.  That Island is not like the nearby coast between Corsica and Sardinia near the Island of Cavallo which is full of rocks and you can very well have an uncharted rock and collide against it as the skipper says.  The Giglio coast line instead goes down very quickly, to 100 meters or more.  The island of Giglio is like the top of a hill or mountain and most likely Francesco Schettino the skipper just drove into it either because he was “asleep at the wheel” or because he was trying on purpose to sail so close to the coast that he hit it in this tragic incident.

Added later:  I read this article about Showboating and it corroborates that the theory that the captain steered the ship into the coastline.