Building mini dams all over

After obtaining my Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard University in September 1963, I decided to accept the offer from the newly established IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain to help in the writing of cases patterned after the Harvard Business School (HBS) model.

- BERNARDO M. VILLEGAS

It was the HBS that introduced for the first time the use of cases in the training of business managers. At that time, Spain was very much a Third World country, still struggling to recover from the ravages of one of the most destructive civil wars (1936 to 1939) in modern history. Our former colonizer was still under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco, the military officer who saved the country from the evils of communism.

I was fortunate to witness first hand the evolution of Spain from a country with a very high rate of poverty to a First World economy by the 1980s. Spain really had to lift itself by the bootstraps because the dictatorial rule that prevailed under Franco made it a pariah among the Western democratic states that ostracized it, denying it the economic and technical assistance given to other developing economies. Fortunately for Spain, Franco was an enlightened leader who knew how to deploy the best and the brightest, regardless of political allegiances, to help him carry out successive development plans that blended strong government action (especially in the aggressive building of infrastructure) with free market economics. It was during my stay in Spain that I learned for the first time the slogan “Build, Build, Build” and the professional title “technocrat.”

In his Build, Build, Build program, there was a special emphasis on the construction of hundreds of small dams all over the country to address the problem of scarcity of water during most of the year coupled with its abundance during short periods, causing serious damage from floods. With characteristic Spanish humor, Franco was nicknamed the “Great Frog” (El Gran Sapo) because he was inaugurating a new mini dam almost every week during my stay there.