Plan your trip with our routes

Tokyo, capital of Japan.

 
I want to be Japanese. I want to be able to walk like them, quietly, almost not touching the floor. I want to give and take things with that sweetness, with both hands and a gentle head gesture, as if everything was a little treasure. I want to live in their houses, with that light that wrap everything up instead of illuminate it. I want the pleasure of feeling their tatamies in my bare feet and sleep in their futons. I wan to eat in their bars with a Japanese cook that prepares sushi piece by piece, as if each maki was a unique jewel. I want to walk in their gardens, surrounded by those trees that you only get after years of patience and tons of caresses.

(more…)

Travelling in a high-speed rail from Tokyo to Takayama

We are travelling right now in a high-speed railway named Shinkansen, the famous bullet-train. Twenty two story wagons, moving at more than 300 kilometres an hour. In the 60’s Japan decided that their transportation logistics was going to be based on the train, not on the plane. There are decisions that mark the future of the companies and the same happens to the countries. There are not many, quite the opposite. At the most, there are one or two every term of office. Maybe more in the business cycles.

In those cases it’s impossible to be certain about which one is going to be the right choice. There are always technocrats, scientists or bureaucrats, if not simple politicians, in favor or against one decision or the other, arguments in one direction and the other, losers and winners. All of them have their own reasons. If that wasn’t the case, they wouldn’t really be decisions. A posteriori, it is not easy to know if those decisions were a good choice because we are talking about issues whose consequences, most of the times, won’t be seen until many years later. Actually, the very same leaders, the real good ones, the ones that at the end of their lives have shown and proved to be successful once and again, when their are asked about the key of their success, they answer that it is just luck.

It is the theory of the window and the mirror. All these leaders “look through the window” in order to look for the reasons that led them to their success, meanwhile they also “look themselves in the mirror” to look for the reasons that led them to the failures, that they also had. In other words, they believe, blindly, that when they were successful it was because of a combination of lucky circumstances, in which they are not included; however, when everything went wrong, they point at themselves as the only guilty ones for not having been able to foresee or solve it. These are the results of a study carried out among the managers of the 50 companies that have increased the most their value in the stock market in the last 20 years. Now, look around. Look at your political leaders or the managers of your companies and notice how they act. In front of a fiasco, do they admit they are responsible or look through the Windows pointing fingers at others? And the other way around. When things go well, do they confess that they are just lucky or they don’t stop claiming the merit?

Now, we are going to pretend that we are the leaders, that we make those decisions that change the course of a company or a country. In order to do that, let’s see how the ones who were successful did it. In the same study that we mention before, they were also asked about the method that they utilized when they had to make a critical decision: 75% of them said that it was mere intuition. Now that they are retired they are not shy about telling the truth. There was no system in place or trick, no magic wands or deep analysis at all. As smart as they could be facing a problem, they were always capable of finding arguments in favor and against, of defending one side or attack the opposite and do it again the other way around. It was so easy that at the end, they could not rationally distinguish which option was the best. They would let their instinct decide.

So let’s forget about everything we know or we have been told and let’s our intuition guide us towards the right decision. If you were the president of your country, which transportation system would you choose? Train as they have in Japan, or plane as in U.S.A.? If you choose the train, would you use a radial or a concentric system? Joining the capital with the rest of the important cities or creating a circle around the country? If you chose the plane, would you prefer a giant hub in the centre of the country or several hubs distributed in the areas where there is more business? You probably think that it’s a stupid game, but it is not. These types of decisions are the ones that mark the success or failure of a country, and in too many occasions the regular citizen pay little or no attention to them.

The two big plane manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, had to bet about how their market is going to be in the future: if the more advanced countries will choose to have one or several hubs. The Americans have decided to develop smaller planes that need less gas and are take off and land easily. In other words, they believe in a net with many interconnections, more hubs and therefore, less travellers per flight. The European consortium, however, have decided to bet for a super plane, the A380, long distance and the maximum number of passengers. They are convinced that the flights will centralize and, the number of hubs won’t increase, and therefore, the distances will be longer and there will be less flights with more passengers.

It will take many years to know which company made the right decision, in the meantime, we have learned our lesson from those “big men”. Facing the great decision we had to make about our starting or not our Round the World trip, we looked for the reasons and arguments but, at the end we let our intuition guide us. If not, we would still be sitting at our desks working instead of being in this Shinkansen at 300 km/h while we eat sushi.