THE FAMILY AND I BEGIN TO ADJUST

By June 1984, my family and I had moved from one place to another five times in the last nine years, First, it was from Guayaquil to Quito in 1975, then from Quito to Salt lake City in 1980, then from Salt Lake City to Houston in 1982, then back from Houston to Salt lake City in 1983, and now, in 1984, from Salt lake City to Guayaquil. Thinking about it, we could have been seen like a Gipsy family, but we were not.
It was just a series of changes from which we learned a lot, from which we enriched our lives and those of our children, for each change there was a good reason, in each change we moved ahead and strengthened our family ties, wherever we went, we grew some roots and flourished, in every place we lived there was a reason to be comfortable and there were many people we liked and were very much liked by. For many reasons we began feeling that we were citizens of the world. In one single way we definitely made headway, we became definitely bicultural, by respecting and maintaining our values and our culture, we honored our homeland and our forefathers, while by absorbing the American culture and values we bettered ourselves enormously.
Even twenty seven years after we left America to return to our country, we love America in the same way we loved it when we returned to Ecuador. Even after such a long time living in Ecuador, we appreciate the people around us not for the amount of money they have, for the fancy house they live in or the fancier car they drive, but for their personal and family values. As an example, we always keep in mind that the lack of punctuality is one of the facts that distinguish Ecuadorian from Americans, even if we sometimes are criticized by our friends we keep our acquired sense of respect for everybody else’s time by being punctual to our appointments, be they a doctor's appointment, a birthday party or a simple get together for a drink. That, we learned from our American friends, that we feel very proud about, and it is because of that, that we will keep in our minds that if we are called for an eight O’clock meeting, that means eight O’clock, not eight thirty or nine O’clock, it is because of that, that we won’t ever have to look for excuses to justify not being punctual to a meeting. In this respect, we are culturally Americans, and are very proud of being so.
Now that we were back where we belong, there were many reasons to be grateful and to be happy about. Our children didn’t take long to get adjusted. During the first two months after our arrival, they were on vacations from school, Mariuxi was 8, Rafael Jr. was 6 and both were fully bilingual, so they didn’t have any language problems to deal with. Little Angie was only 2 and a half and because her big sister and brother spoke English to her, she spoke mostly English but understood Spanish fairly well. It was amazing; in a matter of 30 days she was also speaking Spanish as she spent a lot of time with her Spanish speaking cousins.
By the time we moved out of the Oro Verde Hotel to our new home in Urdesa, she was already speaking and even screaming to her cousins and siblings in fluent Spanish. She was just like a little sponge, absorbing every bit of language she was exposed to. In the meantime, her big sister and brother began to adjust, while liking it very much, the concept of the larger family, which includes as members of one single family the cousins, the nephews, the nieces, the aunts, uncles, grandpas, grandmas, etc., which is a beautiful way of seeing someone's family.
Meanwhile, I began to learn about the rhythm of work at the mill, where an old style of management had prevailed in spite of changes in the management - which had included at least two expatriates at the top and one at the comptrollers’ level. Things had not changed very much in terms of management since the times of the old owner and founder of the mill, Mr. Francisco Illezcas. After all, this was one of those businesses where the management did not have to do much of an effort to promote the sale of its products. Selling wheat flour in Ecuador until just very recently, had been like selling hot bread in a good bakery. Customers not only used to make lines to buy the flour, but they actually used to pre-pay and wait in line for days so the mill would “make them the favor” of shipping the pre-paid sale.
Under those circumstances, it was no wonder that the previous two guys at the top, where just golfers and socialites who were concerned more about what was the next big party at the Union Club or what was the next golf tournament at the Guayaquil Country Club, than about how to improve the company’s sales or its bottom line, which was going to be good no matter what, unless someone smart and dishonest enough would play around with the money that was the only thing the company was not short off.
It was under those circumstances and business environment that I had to start my monumental task of putting Molidor on track as a modern, internationally owned business entity, first by planning and then by implementing policies, procedures and internal controls geared to make the company an organized corporation. When I look back at what I had to do at the time, the human team I had available to me, and the time frame I imposed myself to do it, I think I was extremely overly optimistic, however, as the time went by, and as I was little by little, but consistently advancing in my task, I realize how much one is able to achieve when you work with all your heart and mind put at the service of one cause.
I was able only then to realize that I was not alone in the task of doing the impossible things, I had a man behind me, whose honesty and knowledge of the company, because of his many years of service to it, was like an old, wide open gold mine, I was able to dig into, and extract almost pure, quasi elaborate gold for the purpose of my work.
That man was Jorge Luis Lazo, at the time a 42 year old man (same as me), who had worked for Molidor for over twenty two years in many positions, starting at the bottom, and who was the company’s head bookkeeper at the time of my arrival in Molidor. Jorge was the type of man who would put his heart in anything you asked to do, and he did it never challenging your ideas (his weakest point and one he was never able to overcome). Therefore, having him as my lieutenant was a great advantage because he was always a pusher, a leader who was always in the front, at the head of his group, but at the same time it was a great risk, because he would blindly follow the orders and the time lines without weighing the possibilities of the collateral risks involved, especially when making changes that would have long lasting effects in the organization.
Jorge had in his staff a group of four assistant bookkeepers, all very young and smart, and as such, very open minded, they had recently graduated from Colegio Mercantil, a well known local secondary school, reputed as the best business High School in Guayaquil, all of whom were, at the time, attending business school classes at the University of Guayaquil. That was another great advantage I found in the process of accomplishing my mission to transform Molidor into a modernly organized and well managed business entity. As my plan of modernizing Molidor advanced, getting to better know the people I had to work with, made a great difference, because before that, I thought to myself, almost literally, that my mission was going to be like going from the middle ages to the modern society, without having to go through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment stages of our Western civilization, with the little support of people who would not have a real understanding or sympathy for what I was trying to do.
After three months of working in the indoctrinating process with the accounting team, I felt very encouraged, and I was now ready to jump into what was going to be one of the most challenging and most rewarding missions I had ever faced in my whole career as a professional, Modernizing Molidor, taking it from the first half of the twentieth century to the fast developing management policies and procedures of the end of the century.
While going through the planning and execution of my plan, I thought many times, how rewarding for my ego would have been to show Don Robhom, that deformed mass of human fat in Kansas City, how much I was doing for the subsidiary of the company he was the VP-Finance, and for which he had done so little. Never mind, I did not have the chance to do that, because that physically and mentally deformed man, had been fired less than two months after I took over the comptrollership position at Molidor.
In my next posting: MODERNIZATION CREATES RESISTANCE