It’s been already a couple of years since we first started reading about Spain’s economic downturn. Since then, our brick & mortar-driven economy has collapsed leaving a weakened country with very little productive industrial sector and a service industry highly dependent on the well-doing of foreign economies. As normal side-effects, unemployment rocketed through the roofs and consumption plummeted. Yet, there is still a general sentiment amongst Spaniards that these are problems that the government should fix for them where the crude reality is that the public administration has only the power to create new tools and promote certain methods.
As a non-politically affiliated organization, Tetuan Valley is in no position to neither evaluate nor comment on the quality and the performance of the tools and methods implemented by our current government or the ones proposed by the opposition. However, as citizens of this country, we do believe that is ultimately us [the Spaniards] the ones responsible of taking the reins of this horse and ride it out of the crisis.
Looks familiar??? (courtesy of Scott Adams)
Yes, the situation in Spain nowadays is less than ideal. Times are tough and they seem to be getting tougher, but desperate times call for creative and original solutions. As Orson Welles’s character points out in 1949’s masterpiece The Third Man “in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance”. Similar examples can be seen throughout History: Galileo and the Inquisition, the French Revolution, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Civil Rights Movement… It is scarcity or the lack of something needed what really forces individuals to question the establishment, venture into where nobody else has dare to go before and find innovative solutions.
We agree, of course, that it is way more comfortable to sit down, moan and complain about an external intangible factor that seems to be [only in appearance] out of our control, and wait for others to a resolve the problem for us. Nevertheless, quoting Sydney J. Harris on the title was not unintentional: “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”. In this context, pessimism and inaction are nothing but mere weapons of economic mass destruction.
Spain is, now more than ever, in desperate need for problem-solvers; people who think out of the box, venture into the unexplored and are ready to question the status quo if they have to. In Tetuan Valley we want to foster, empower and prepare these entrepreneurs to succeed in guiding us out of this economic downturn while creating a new, sustainable economic model for our country.
In Tetuan Valley, we are looking for the leaders that will guide Spain to a bright new future. Are you ready to become part of the solution?
———–
NOTE: If you can’t wait to start your path towards becoming part of the solution, Tetuan Valley is hosting an Entrepreneur Commons‘ event tonight @ 19:00 in Okuri Spaces (C/Pinos Baja, 89 28029 Madrid, Spain). You can still register here
