5 Minutes Podcast with Ricardo Vargas

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Project Management in Agribusiness. He explains how we can apply project management in this segment, which is so different for many of us. Ricardo comments that agribusiness is transforming as powerful as the technology area, using digitalization, georeferencing e technology, and project to select crops that will be used in this area. For example, the ha...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Law of Diminishing Returns applied to the effort we make to manage projects. We often doubt how much management is worth, and we try to simplify management as much as possible to avoid bureaucracy when we spend a lot of time in meetings or filling out documents and templates without reaching any results. Ricardo explains that according to the law of...

In this week's podcast, Ricardo talks about leadership and followership and the paranoia of today's society to exclusively focus on leadership. This episode reflects on questions like: Is being a leader the only essential profile for a company? How is the followership in this equation? Don't we all have to develop skills to lead and to be led too? Can a job be done only with leaders? Who will perf...

In this week's podcast, Ricardo talks about negotiation and how it is inserted into our daily lives far beyond buying and selling relationships. He talks about negotiation steps and how we often make mistakes when skipping important phases of this process. The initial exchange of information, the offer, the counter-offer, and the bargaining techniques are all important phases that should not be di...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the difference between compliance and conformity. Compliance and conformity are rules that an organization must always follow. However, the purpose of each is quite different. Often the company decides to follow a specific rule not because it has to but because it is good for the business, such as obtaining ISO certification. In this case, we are talking...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about availability bias. He explains that when a risky event is repeatedly exposed on the news or by a group of people next to us, our perception is altered by that exposure, which often makes us lose rationality about the real probability or impact. One of the examples is the panic seized by the delay of flights all over the world. Of course, there is a delay...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Global Project Management Forum 2022 in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is investing in a series of megaprojects called "Vision 2030" that involve all aspects of society, from housing construction and financing to the liberation and promotion of tourism, from the digital government, using artificial intelligence big data in healthcare to the administratio...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Gallup - State of the Global Workspace 2022 report. This report is the result of an interview with people around the world and shows the level of stress, motivation, and engagement of people working in companies. According to the report, 60% of people interviewed consider themselves disconnected from work. And to make matters worse, 19% are actively...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the potential applications of artificial intelligence in projects and compares the different impacts and implementation complexity of each of them. He comments that a project that is self-managed in all dimensions by Artificial Intelligence will have a tremendous impact on both the people involved in the project and the project itself. However, the compl...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" in projects, that is, how different perspectives on a problem can dramatically change our ability to solve it. Making an analogy with a photo, when we use Zoom in, we can see in more detail a small part of that photo. This Zoom In helps us understand "surgically" when in a crisis scenario. However, in some situations, Zoom In mak...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Daily Scrum, the daily Scrum meeting. Ricardo gives five tips that can increase the effectiveness of the process, including aspects related to duration, format, and even the sequence of topics to be addressed. Spoiler: It is possible to use many Daily Scrum features in project meetings that use other approaches! Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to...

In this week's episode, Ricardo addresses the pitfalls of the "easy" route to certification. He explains that we often want to find a shortcut to achieving our goals, such as getting a professional certification. However, the certification may apply to your CV or LinkedIn profile. Now, if it is not accompanied by understanding, it is worth little and survives even less. We have many course options...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Forensic Planning, explaining that this is an area of ​​Project Management widely used for claims, litigation, and lawsuits. Often in capital projects or large projects, delays and other types of disruption happen when parties disagree on which side is responsible. This type of work attempts to assess and support the parties in the solution and identify...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the three central values ​​that project management brings to the organization that you could talk about in a brief speech in an Elevator Pitch. The first: Project management is one of the most powerful tools to organize your workflow and prevent chaos from setting in. Regardless of the approach used, project management will define the criteria that will...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the latest news published in the press about the streaming service Netflix, which, upon announcing the first reduction in the number of subscribers to the platform in the last ten years, suffered a devastating drop in the value of its shares. Netflix's value dropped from more than 300 billion dollars at the end of 2020 to 89 billion after the announcemen...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about customizing methods and approaches in project management. He explains that we insist on finding a solution that solves all the problems in the project, but in reality, there is no "One size fits all." No methodology or approach is universally perfect for all scenarios, and the nature of the project and the very definition presuppose something unique. Tod...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Round-Robin Brainstorming technique. Ricardo explains that with this technique, everyone participates by analyzing, confirming, and questioning the other participants, and he makes an analogy between a football championship, where all teams play each other. Round-Robin prevents the dominant personality from conducting the brainstorming in a direction...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about flexibility and inflexibility when planning something. We often have the mindset of planning, executing, and controlling something so that it must go exactly as planned. Any variation in the plan is bad and should be avoided, this is inflexibility, and all we don't have today is predictability, showing that the world of inflexibility no longer exists. Ri...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Satir Change Model, created by family psychologist Virginia Satir, considered the mother of modern family psychology. The podcast has a business focus, even though it was created thinking in the family environment. The model became widely used in the business context change process. The model tells us that, despite the final result of the change being po...

In this week's episode, Ricardo returns to the concept of Antifragile, presented by Nicholas Taleb in his book, where Taleb stated that the antifragile "is not necessarily the opposite of fragile" but "what improves with shock." Ricardo talks about making the different types of systems antifragile, systems that can be you, your career, or your company. He complements the concept and outlines the f...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the concept of Antifragile, presented by Nicholas Taleb in his book. To better explain it, Ricardo explains the meaning of being "fragile" and "robust," where "robust" is not necessarily the opposite of fragile. Robust refers to the ability to resist shock and is not necessarily improved by shock. What improves with shock is Antifragile. And what you gai...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the Hawthorne effect. Despite the rather unusual name, the effect is associated with changing our behavior whenever someone observes us. He gives examples in our daily lives, such as the compliments our young children receive when they stay at other people's houses or when we watch programs like Big Brother. Ricardo also talks about the Hawthorne effect...

Ricardo recently watched, using his project management perspective, the documentary "Fyre - The Great Event That Never Happened," which was recommended by a friend. Fyre was supposed to be one of the music festivals that was supposed to be one of the most exclusive globally and ended up being a complete fiasco. The initial idea was to create an event to promote the celebrity booking application ca...

Faced with this week's events with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ricardo had decided not to record any new episode this week. However, today he decided to record a different episode, talking about empathy and support in uncertain times like the current ones. In this week's episode, he talks about the importance of understanding that reality has changed and that there is no perspective on how the s...

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about the similarities and differences between managing projects/programs/portfolios and managing products. He explains that the product is the result of a project or program most of the time. However, it can also result from chance or simply an unexpected opportunity. The life cycle of a product can involve numerous projects: from the creation of the product...