There isn’t much to comment on about Atlético Mineiro’s poor result in Wednesday’s match in Morocco that hasn’t already been said.
However, something caught my attention days ago while reading about the Mineiro team’s preparation: The club’s assistant coach lost all the notes from the research he had done about the club’s possible opponents, as reported by globoesporte.
A few comments from the article catch my attention:
“A lost suitcase is annoying. A lost suitcase with notes about a team’s opponents in a Club World Cup is much more annoying. Because it happened to Cuca’s assistant, the main person responsible for dissecting the other tournament participants.
In the lost piece were the observation notebooks about them. Cuquinha plunged into agony. He even lost sleep, incredulous at the tremendous bad luck.
The club’s logistics team used everything they had to try to solve the problem. In vain.
And the harm could have been even greater. In the carry-on, the assistant carried an iPad and DVDs with details about Bayern Munich, a possible opponent in an eventual World Cup final.
The good news is that Cuquinha is famous for having an elephant’s memory. From his head, he can remember a good part of what he wrote down.”
Honestly, it scares me to know that today, a corporation the size of Clube Atlético Mineiro has no idea what “the cloud” is.
How is it that the work of months of research by a professional who easily earns tens of thousands of reais per month is confined to a “notebook” in a checked suitcase?
All the strategic planning of a club that has a budget in the millions of reais is written down with a pen, without copies, and without the possibility of being collaborative or shared quickly.
It’s almost tragicomic when the journalist reports that the “club’s logistics team” used “everything they had (read: money)” to recover the notes.
They even conclude it could have been worse — they could have lost the DVDs!!! Is this serious? DVDs?
At another point in the interview, the professional doesn’t believe in the “bad luck” he had.
Well, my opinion about bad luck and luck is that you build them. There is randomness, you don’t have control over it, but I like the quote that says: Luck is when opportunity meets someone who is prepared.
There is no way to blame bad luck for such an absurd error of logistics and management.
I have been saving files in the “cloud” since the beginning of the century. We wanted to share the chord charts of the songs we played at church. I would transcribe our scribbles into a TXT file, upload it to a shared FTP account, and there it was — the whole band had access to the chord chart, with the advantage that the password was shared, so there was remote collaboration from everyone interested.
Today, more than 10 years later, I don’t know how anyone manages to organize themselves without using the “cloud.”
I have my personal and work calendars in two separate Google Calendar accounts;
My photos are synchronized directly, whether from my Samsung camera, my Nexus 5 phone, or my Google Glass with Picasa;
My text documents and spreadsheets are shared with my whole team across two continents and 6 different cities through Google Drive — we collaborate, create comments, and do a lot of evolution without being tied to time zones, and all of this stays with a very intuitive change history;
My personal documents, copies of bills, notes for possible blog posts, and even a copy of the ticket with the seat number of where I watched The Hobbit 2 (so I can know where to go when I return to the cinema) are all on Evernote.
How many times have you needed your dog’s vaccination certificates, to quickly remember which column/seat you should buy at the cinema, or a copy of tickets to enter a concert but forgot them somewhere? In my case, I traveled to San Diego without any electronic device, went to an internet café 2 hours before the game, accessed my evernote, printed the ticket, and went to the Broncos game.
I can list here several other products I use to manage my life: the Kanban with my company’s current “sprint”? It’s on JIRA. The details, time estimates, future planning, and comments on tasks that I, or any other member of my team, have to do, also; the articles I would like to read, but haven’t had time yet, are on Instapaper, which syncs with my Nexus, iPad, and Kindle in real time.
My videos of soccer matches, hours in the sea surfing with my GoPro, or even copies of my wedding DVD are on DropBox.
It doesn’t surprise me that Atlético lost in the semifinal — to achieve higher flights, this Galo (Rooster) will need to learn to live “in the Cloud.”