José Manuel dos Santos

I have come to believe there are human qualities that supersede any training for people leadership, I believe some people are just more natural at it, and while we can all improve in every domain, I believe natural and organic people leaders have an invisible advantage. When you are lucky to have a good people leader you know it, you feel it, your life improves, you learn and you evolve, you grow and many times you will end up moving on, and those people leaders will be a part of your life.

There is something about a crowd of 40,000 people singing at the same time, you look everywhere, and you capture the ecstasy via their shining eyes, you relate and connect with other human beings in this shared experience, independently of who they are, what they eat, who they vote for.

But I remember this particular occasion, because one morning after partying night, we were ‘asked’ to be in a meeting space at 8am. Needless to say, we were all still heavy headed and in need of plenty of water, a gentleman who by the tone of his voice had not been partying the previous night, had 4 different newspapers taped to the walls, several pages of different newspapers, with large red markings on them, all in all it must have been 20 newspaper pages, and we were afraid he’d make us read out loud!

I want to think that those that choose to work on those complex problems have their hearts in the right place, and have sound business and people skills, and understand the impact of their decision in people, families, businesses and cities for years to come, people trained in dealing with the utopia and the dystopia of cities.

I’m staying at a beach I call ‘my beach’, my grandmother used to come here, my mother used to come here, and now I try to come every year. I did so with everyone that is important to me, both my kids have photos here since they were born, and I just had a couple of old friends over for a couple of days. Does that qualify as my beach, beyond an expression?

My best teacher was the artist and painter in charge of experimental drawing, he taught us how to keep a diary of materials and mediums, how to explore and experiment, how to observe and to see, how to questions via expression, how to sketch, and doodle, and play as we learned who we were in the world.

I come from a generation that had a bookshelf in the living room, among all the books and independently of what they were about, you’d find one or more dictionaries, and the ultimate prize used to be a collection of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a general knowledge ‘database’ first published in Scotland in 1768. Known for its scholarly approach and reliability, the articles were written by experts and scholars in various fields, and it was seen as a trusted reference source for everybody.

I was in my twenties when my father started losing his eyesight, he was a diabetic and had retinopathy. When he started losing the left eye, he went to get laser treatment, but something went wrong and he lost the eye, so when he started losing the right eye, he didn’t want to risk it and basically lived until he was completely blind.

It made me think of all the possibilities and made me wonder about all the new Gen AI professions that will pop up in the next 10 to 20 years. Forget prompt engineering, which is like knowing how to “speak machine” as a toddler, like John Maeda would say, this is a means to an end. What professions were born out of the industrial revolution? And of the Internet? What new professions and skillset’s will be born out of Gen AI? How many of those will be the future of music, and design?

Strong design brands seem to be having a tough time maintaining their relevance, it’s harder to create and sustain an end-to-end customer experience, dealing with changing market dynamics, deal with constant low-cost pressure. And perhaps we should not aim for it, Jeff Bezos apparently said “Amazon is not too big to fail… In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt.” Perhaps this was just IRMA’s time to go.