I recently had the opportunity to return to the Republic of Panama to participate in the 2nd year of The Nature of Business, a Geoversity executive program on January 30th through February 4th with an amazing group. Before the program began, I spent a long weekend in the Mamoni Valley Preserve in the jungles of Panama northeast of Panama City. As Mother Nature is the greatest teacher, I’m excited to share some of the lessons I learned and experiences I had during the trip.
My journey started on Friday, January 26th and I made my way to the Mamoni Valley Preserve, where my wife Julia and I have invested with others to protect over 8,800 acres of mostly primary rainforest. I awoke on Saturday morning in Centro Mamoni to greet many friends who arrived early to spend some time in the jungle including Will Ditzler, my business coach, Nathan Gray, founder of Earth Train, Colin Wiel, tech entrepreneur and founder/investor of the Mamoni Valley Preserve, Guillermo Sohnlein and David Meerman Scott, best selling marketing author, speaker (and a fellow Deadhead!). I was also able to meet with new friends including Lara Cumberland, VP M&A at Facebook, Tommy François, a video game creator at Ubisoft and Raisa Banfield, Vice Mayor of Panama City.
On Sunday January 28th, a group of us took an amazing 6-mile hike through the preserve, swam at La Zahina Falls and then kayaked 4 miles back down the Mamoni River. During our hike and kayak, we had many stimulating conversations while encountering bullet ants, monkeys, giant fig trees, creeks, rivers, waterfalls and more. We spoke about how complex yet sensitive the rainforest ecosystem is and compared it to our businesses. While at Mamoni I also spent time with Mark Knetsch, CEO of Experience Mamoni scoping out a 5kW solar array with storage that Inovateus will be helping with this year.
The morning of Tuesday, January 30th, everybody made their way into Panama City and gathered with all of the Nature of Business attendees and faculty at the Panama Presidential Compound. It was a pleasure to see everyone who attended the previous year including Stanley Motta, Chairman of Copa Airlines, whom I enjoyed many solar conversations with which included how the technology could be adapted to the electrical infrastructure in Panama. The following day we kicked off the formal presentations by Verne Harnish, CEO of Gazelles International and author of Scaling Up, David Ricketts, Harvard Innovation Fellow, Alistair Crowell, Visiting Executive at Harvard Business School, Jay Harman, CEO of Pax Scientific and author of biomimicry and my favorite presentation of the entire event by David Meerman Scott.
The following day we headed out to San Jose Island where we continued our discussions and workshops but were also able to have free time to connect with different attendees and presenters. A couple of my favorite conversations on the island included kayaking in the Pacific with David Ricketts who asked me, “What will be the major challenges your company and the solar business will face in the next 10 years?” There wasn’t a short answer to his question but I stressed the need for further cost reduction as the solar and storage industries converge and to greatly simplify the financing solutions for customers. Another great conversation I had was with Verne Harnish who presented many thoughts on how our company could have a winning cash strategy for years to come. The entire trip I loved talking with David Meerman Scott about the Grateful Dead and how they constantly evolved and innovated their business, creating such a loyal fan-base that only continues to grow even 23 years after their lead vocalist, guitarist and icon Jerry Garcia passed away. I even got to play some Grateful Dead tunes on the beach our last evening on the island with Flamenco guitarist Juanito Pascual who also attended the event and played for the group on several occasions. And after two days on the island of great content and interaction with the group, we headed back to Panama City for a final dinner, drinks and it was back home to South Bend.
So what did I learn about nature and business? The major takeaway I had this year is that nature loves “easy” and so do customers of almost any business. Mother nature always finds the easiest way to accomplish her goal. A river flows to the path of least resistance, birds fly in a flock to reduce draft and customers like to purchase products from companies like Amazon because they can click a few buttons and products will show up at their door within a day. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been pondering and discussing ways that we can continue to make solar as easy as possible for our customers. We’ve built a team that can develop projects, a team that can perform the engineering, procurement and construction and we are working on the financing solutions but we must continue to make it easier while improving what we already have. To become widely adopted, solar needs to be as easy as it is to purchase on Amazon.com. I’ve learned that we as humans often go through life and conduct business making such a fuss and over complicate things immensely. If we continually study and learn from nature and the way it has evolved for billions of years, our lives could be much easier- after all, we are nature at it’s finest.
By TJ Kanczuzewski, Chairman, Inovateus Solar
