imaginCafé: Net Talk con David Cabero

First of all, I want to say that Cristian is my biggest supporter. What led me to Net Mentores is a beautiful story: helping generate employment, helping startups. Young people with drive but not used to building teams or internationalizing. So any help is welcome. I'm a partner and on the board with Cristian, and I'm very happy to be here.

I thought it would be easier, but it took a year and a half. The reasons: when I studied at university, people came to tell their stories and I learned. After 25 years learning and doing, if I can help through a book, so be it. Also, all proceeds go to the association, not to me. So the second reason is to help not with money but with time. The book is called 'Deciding in Times of Peace' and it's a practical guide to deciding better. Deciding means choosing, saying no to some things and yes to one. If you only have one path, there's no decision.

I try to explain why we decide incorrectly. To make it practical, I included a four-page method at the end, but there is no single method. Decisions are becoming more intuitive because the world changes fast. We have all the data we want, but still decisions are uncertain.

The title has nothing to do with current war. War means stress: economic difficulty, pressure from above, time constraints, personal weight. That makes decisions different. In peace, things go well. But how many really important decisions do we take in a year? Studies say 35,000 decisions a day, but most are automatic. Only a few are truly impactful. Executives think they have many decisions because they don't delegate, but that's not true.

It's not easy. For example, if you want to please your boss, you agree with them even if not correct. That's a bias. To become aware, you need to know yourself. If you know you care a lot about people, when it's time to restructure, you'll have a bias not to do so. You have to be conscious of that. Deciding with emotion is fine, but you must be aware of the emotion. It requires introspection.

It requires humility: possibly your idea is not the best. So you triangulate with three people based on their track record. You ask their opinions and see if different profiles coincide. But the problem is many executives only want confirmation, not destruction of their idea. The difficulty is humility and being open to change.

If you can't fix it, you admit it publicly so others learn. There are three ways to learn: from others' errors, from your own private errors, and from errors everyone sees. The last is rare. For example, Nokia's CEO later said the strategy was good but implementation failed, but that's wrong. He didn't learn. First understand errors, then let many learn so they don't repeat. Admitting errors makes you stronger, but if the team has seen you err before, saying it again doesn't help. So executives often don't admit it, and the organization doesn't learn.

There are many types and methods. In the book I talk about three: poker (little information, bet, learn little), chess (strategy, adapt, learn always), and puzzle/labyrinth (only one correct solution, dangerous). Each has its approach.

Startups are binary: they do very well or close. I feel more comfortable because it's easier. Key is the team—founders who can pivot and change models quickly. I've seen many startups change business model within a month. So I look at the team's ability to execute.

Absolutely, what they have created... So investing in state-owned companies is very complicated, and I encourage everyone to do it, but it's complicated and you have to assume the risk; you can lose everything. And there are many other investments where the poorest don't lose everything in startups. So how do you decide? There is a lot of intuition and, above all, you look at the quality of the team, the business model, but in a very global way because it will change, and there's not much more to the formula. There's no formula; it's just diving in. Also, when we talked about biases earlier, and we talked about whether you care about people...

Leaders and executives who work well in the very long term have five or four characteristics: they must know how to create a vision for their team, know how to communicate it to generate commitment; they must know how to decide, take the current decision, and sometimes it's hard, but they have to be passionate and have the fifth characteristic that differentiates many executives: genuine interest in people. If you don't have it, people will understand, and if I communicate and push people away, it's not going to work. You try to stretch them to come with you; if they know that what I do is not what I say, they won't follow you. That's what happens in companies when they set a good strategy but people don't follow it. People are part of success; they help you make better decisions because if you triangulate using their capacity, you make better decisions. In the end, people are the ingredients that make you better. It's the team that makes you good. This is true in sports, in business, in everything. People are very important.

It's difficult to say which one, but what is very important is not to think that your idea is the best and that you are always right. If you internalize that, then when you use people who give feedback and triangulate, if you made a mistake, say 'I was wrong, we'll do this.' That's a very simplified version of everything I say, but it's the basis. Because if you have a good team, you have the whole process: diagnosis, options. But if you've already decided and you're stubborn, it's of little use. So I would say there is only a sixth one...

A very interesting one: I think it's not so simple to know if the decision you made is the correct one. Sometimes the result is clear, but that's only sometimes. Because sometimes you make a decision, but other things happen and the result is good, but not because of your decision. I'll give an example in football that everyone will understand. If you have a team with Messi and you score five goals, then they score four, you win. You changed the defenders at halftime; you were winning 5-0? No, you were drawing. You changed the defenders and they score four goals, but you win because of Messi, not because of the defenders you changed. But the decision might still be good? This is never so simple. It applies to marketing people, to prices: you raise prices, and you're afraid of losing quantity because now is a moment of inflation, but your competitors... and it turns out you sell the same as last year, but because of China your competitors have no stock, so it's not that you did well to raise prices because you lost nothing, but when those products come from China and really compete on the shelf, you won't sell. Why do I say this? Because sometimes there is coincidence or causality, and you have to understand if the decision and impact have causality or are just coincidence. In business, it's not easy to separate. Sometimes it's clear you got it right, sometimes you think you did but it was dumb luck, and sometimes it's so clear that you hide the bad decisions by saying the other was worse.

You've asked many questions. The first one, about personality: personality is emotions; there is a much more structured and scientific part and an emotional part. So depending on your personality and emotions, that will impact. To make it very simple, some people have no problem with risk and are very... everyone in the startup world has no aversion to risk, so they take risks. That's your personality. Other people find risk a problem and struggle more. So personality impacts. Then your own personality, but also the urgency... the personalities of the team, not just yours. So personality is also that of others in the ecosystem that will decide. But it is true that you have to know yourself because depending on who you are, there are things you won't decide or will find much harder to decide. So you have to be aware. If you are aware, you can work on it. If you are not aware...

You have to restructure how you decide. If you fire me or someone equal? Being objective? You will never be objective, so forget it. There is subjectivity in everything: the analysis, the situation, the options, the final decision. If you are subjective in everything, it will be complicated. But forget thinking you will become objective; that's not true because we are people and we decide with all our biases, emotions, fears, and the company culture.

Company culture is very important, especially in difficult times, but always. You see this with the culture of the country. There are very autocratic cultures and now we are in conflicts... you can imagine other cultures in countries in conflict. What it does is shape the people born in that country: the way of leading, the cultural model you are born into. It's not the same to be born in Romania, France, Spain, or Russia. We can give examples of China, other countries. Then this personal culture from the country is impacted by the company culture. Some companies are very open, others much more vertical in decision-making. If you are in a vertical decision culture and they tell you to create and decide, you think 'yes, but I will create, but in the end they will decide what they want, so why should I create?' Culture impacts a lot because it predisposes your people one way or another. If it's a culture of discussion and open, that helps discussion and triangulation. If it's a closed culture, it limits how you work with the team. Culture is very important. It gives you the setting, the base to be able to decide. If you have built a team and reach a crisis you mentioned, stress and crisis: if you arrive with a strong team accustomed to discussing differences without problems, that's a great advantage. If you arrive with a conflictive team where there is no discussion and they don't work together, then when the war comes, there are two wars: internal and external, and you are dead. Culture is the base, the way we discuss our differences, rituals, what we accept and what we don't. That is the base for the team to work.

Increasingly, as there are complex problems, delegation is governance. It tells us that for this type of problem, certain people can decide. So delegation delegates the decision process. And in that delegation, each one says: I have my country, the general manager of a country, marketing director of a country, commercial director of a region or of a certain type of channel or customer, and I make my decisions. And as we said before, since there are very few important decisions, companies tend to delegate; if you don't delegate, you are not using your talent, and talent gets bored and leaves. So a good culture is one that also exposes and gives responsibility to people. And it's true that the problem it generates is clarity: in a self-management culture, who decides? When I ask you, am I asking for advice or telling you that you will decide? In teams where this is not clarified from the beginning, decisions are fatal because they think they have decision power when in the end they only have opinion power. So you have to clarify it. And it's fine to say: I want your opinion, I listen, I take it into account.

Well, the thing is we think everything is urgent, but very few things are urgent. We have a predisposition to think everything is urgent. You have to separate: if it's urgent, put someone to solve it. If it's urgent and important, you get involved yourself. If it's not urgent, how important is it? If it's not very important, delegate it to the team. If it's very important, you get involved with the team. The difficulty is that we confuse urgency with importance because we don't think about it. In the end, everything becomes important, and sometimes important and urgent. And when we misclassify, we have an entire company doing the same thing. For example, the CEO is in a store in Barcelona, doesn't see a product in four colors that he knows sells well in Spain, takes a photo, sends it to the global commercial director, who sends it to the European general manager at midnight: 'No product, what are you doing? Send to Spain to put up the display tomorrow, I want a photo.' And then you have the entire organization working for a week on that. Is it important? Not really. The problem is we have that chain reaction, and no one stops to think. You have the entire executive committee of a company billing 2 billion looking at a photo of a shopping cart. That happens to us.

Well, sometimes it's not methodology or learning; what you have to do is think about it. How many times are you right? How many times have you stopped to think about the decision, to make the grid: more important, less important, more urgent, less urgent, and place it in the four quadrants? We never do it. Because if you think about it, it's not that difficult with a bit of experience. But someone who just started working, they understand this. We don't do it because there's also the problem that not only is it important/urgent for you, but for your people too. It's not easy. But I think what you have to do is ask yourself the question. If you ask yourself, you will be wrong very rarely. If you are wrong, you will understand why and next time you'll do it right. So you are very clear: when it's not very important and very urgent, who does things? How to organize? And you have those four quadrants clear. The problem is we live in a society of immediacy, and we want everything now. Younger people want everything tomorrow, now. So urgency is not just the poet; we live in a world, not a criticism, but in the metaverse, everything is immediate. Here, with a display of four colors, you might take a bit because the distribution center is in Madrid, you have to place the order, someone has to set it up. But people live in a world where everything is tomorrow, more and more. So it's a matter of reflection and also thinking about the cost. Because if you have the entire organization working on a stupidity, and you don't realize the cost, you won't change. When you see it, like the office in Sant Just, and you see people looking at that damn display of four colors, you realize that the display cost you a fortune. So it's about placing the decision correctly, classifying the decision well before having the team work on it.

If I forget the second... the grandmother question? I have two trick questions. The first: the prologue of my book. The prologue talks about two things: success in life in general, personal and professional, is luck and making good decisions, each time better. Luck comes and goes. To be clear: if you have an agricultural business and it doesn't rain for three years, that's bad luck. Maybe you have insurance that covers something, but it's not your fault. Conversely, if you have a coffee shop and a school opens in front of you, and you have lots of kids and parents coming, that's luck. But if you open for breakfast, put out lunch for high school students, and then serve afternoon snacks and beer for parents, that's not just luck; that's a good decision with the luck of having a school in front. So the first thing is to separate the two. But when you have success, you say you made a very good decision, and when you don't, you say you had bad luck. So you don't separate them clearly. But luck is what it is. In the end, success is about learning to decide better each time. The second question: how to identify someone in an interview? In a two-hour interview, it's very complicated. What you can look at is how they think, how they structure a problem. Even if they give a wrong answer because they don't know your market, ask how they would do something and see how they structure their thinking. It's very subtle, intuitive. There's a part method but very intuitive. Doing it many times well doesn't mean you won't make a mistake next time. For example, choosing a commercial director: you might choose well ten times, and then choose wrong because the person is clever and gives you a great story and you don't realize it's not true. Because you have a bias. Now I'll give you an example of bias, maybe a provocative one: bias about gender. You want someone for an important position and a woman comes. You look at two people, you see the CV: this woman has three children. With a negative bias, you think, 'Oh, I'm going to give this responsibility to a person with three children? She won't have time, she'll dedicate time to family, not the company, I don't want her.' That's a negative bias. It happens, and many people don't realize it. The positive bias: if this person has made this career and has three children and has reached such a high level, she knows how to combine things, she is very organized, I want her. Both are bad. So determining who will decide well most of the time is very complicated. You take them into the team and then life tells you if you made a mistake. And above all, what you do to help them, how you develop their decision-making capacity from a 10 to a 12 or 14 by teaching them when they make a mistake, asking why. But there is no golden formula.

First, you have to be conscious. When you are afraid of something, be aware that you are looking at the problem with fear. If you realize you are afraid, that can be managed. If you are afraid but don't realize it, it's much more difficult because you will find excuses not to decide. Have you ever heard someone say 'I can't decide because I don't have all the data'? They ask for more data, but it's a way to delay the decision because they are afraid. So first, be aware. Then something that helps a lot: what happens if I don't decide? For example, with my teams when we need to raise prices because raw material costs go up, they are afraid of losing units. So if we don't decide, we lose money. You have to put yourself in front of the mirror and say: if I don't decide, maybe it will be much worse. So what I recommend: realize you are afraid, and then look at the options because it's not a simple yes/no. For example, restructuring: if I don't restructure today, maybe tomorrow the company will be worse. When people put themselves in front of the mirror, they try to be more objective, limit bias, and open options. When you have many options, you decide with your emotions but knowing what will happen if you don't decide. Some people find it harder and need help from their boss or experienced people. If you don't improve your ability to decide, you will limit your projection.