What’s your motivation?
I’m excited to be starting up Transrio for two reasons, each separate and distinct:
It’s what I really, really want to be doing. I love every aspect of it — the opportunity to be working with other smart business people, the challenges (for me) of transacting business across borders and in Spanish, the steep learning curve. Already I’m making connections in Argentina, learning web design, assembling translation tools, studying online payment options, reading about interesting companies. It’s 100% stuff that pulls me along, and every day I wish I could get more hours in at work. Why it should be so engaging I don’t know, nor do I care. This has been my style of working, my whole life. The only drawback to Transrio is lower pay per hour when compared to doing similar types of projects in the US. Happily, I’m at a stage where I can afford to overlook this, and go straight where I’m called. I’m thinking I’ll find ways to make it more profitable as I pick up experience and the details fill in.
For over a decade I’ve enjoyed learning about development economics, just as an interest. This was completely unrelated to my work at Great Harvest, and it’s unrelated to Transrio. But after we sold the business in 2001 and while living in Bolivia, it was natural to look toward some sort of development work as my next job. I quickly talked myself out of this — all of my skills and instincts are in business, and I found out I just don’t belong in that world. I wouldn’t be good at it.
But I still enjoy reading, thinking, and talking with friends about poverty issues. (By the way if you share my interest in this I made a quick page for book recommendations and other links: Pete’s Development Corner.) I’m now convinced that good business people and good development people don’t mix, at least not on the job. And also that, while everyone’s in agreement that growing businesses are foundational to reducing poverty, there probably isn’t any way to to help this process along with outside aid.
Meanwhile, back at Transrio. I have a job with one foot in Argentina, the other in the US. I do projects that have a real business value — or I don’t get paid. I have this built-in curiosity about development issues, and just because of where I spend my working day, I could notice something interesting. I believe in my heart that there is no way to assist businesses using development money or advice. But there is a lot of development money out there (like, $70 billion/year). If I’m wrong, and there actually IS some effective and leveraged way to truly help businesses using aid money, that might open another opportunity — different from Transrio.
I really don’t expect this. But it adds to the general interestingness as I work along on projects. Of all the places I could be, this junction-point where business, knowledge management, Argentina, and the United States all overlap is a great place for a guy to keep his eyes open, for any least-expected opportunity.
Bottom line then — for now my motivation is to dive in, and see where this goes. There’s really not any more to it than that; and that’s actually good enough for me.
