I am back down in Nicaragua for the second time in two months.  The organization is coming into its own through an intensive process of human resource needs evaluation, restructuring and development of both soft and hard infrastructure.  Lining up all existing resources in a defined strategic direction is challenging to say the least – but the effort is already showing payoffs.  Members of our now large team of 30 on the ground in Nicaragua are operating in more clearly defined roles and with a clearer vision of blueEnergy’s mission.  Not to say it’s all worked out, far from it, but the process has begun and can be trusted to take us to where we want and need to be.

This trip has been very special for me.  First, my wife Lorelei accompanied me on the first 5 days of trip – making her first visit to Nicaragua.  Since the launching of the organization in 2003, Lorelei has born the title of “Princess of blueEnergy” and she has supported the organization in every way imaginable, from afar.  She is an attorney in San Francisco and her long hours in the office and the courtroom have made blueEnergy possible.  The trade off is that she gets very little time off and getting to our remote location is no easy task.  For Lorelei this short visit was an opportunity to put faces to all the names she’s heard about for a long time and to see with her own eyes what blueEnergy has become.  For me her visit was a very special time and I hope I can get her back down again soon.

The second major thing happening on this trip is that we are hosting Hugh Piggott, the original designer of the wind turbine blueEnergy uses.  Hugh has been an inspiration to me since before the birth of blueEnergy and has contributed in countless ways to the organization through his knowledge sharing, training, and general insights.  It took many years to coordinate this visit and now Hugh is here for three weeks for a mixture of staff training, a semi-public conference/workshop, public events and cultural tours, of course!

Hugh and Lorelei in Nicaragua.

Business wisdom tells us to focus – do one thing and do it extremely well.  But this rests on the assumption that one is surrounded by a well-oiled business environment, where you can focus on your widget and integrate it into the already existing logisitcs, financial, human resource, and physical infrastructure landscape.  However, in barren landscapes, where there are few if any partners available, one doesn’t have the luxury of merely focusing on one thing.  Rather, one has to develop a holistic solution, an eco-system if you will, that is able to create sustainable solutions.  This is not a violation of the focus mantra, but it does have implications, namely that you can’t do eco-system, holistic solutions for everyone.  You have to focus somewhere and if you have a broad product/service offering, then you have to be focused in your customer/beneficiary base.

We have learned in our 4 years of operations in Nicaragua that we need to be far more selective of our early customers to help ensure early success that we can build on.  The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua where we operate is rugged, multi-lingual and multi-cultural.  Each community has its own characteristics and world visions, and they differ dramatically.  There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution out here.  More then ever now I can see the need for us to focus on one or maybe two subsets of this population in the beginning so that we can learn about their needs in depth and mature our service offering.  With a strong success story there, we can then move on to other customers.