The Mexican

Guess what the man who said these things does for a living?

Vision:

“When I look at something, I don’t see it for what it is, I see it for what it could be. When I look at something, I see how it ends.”

Ambition:

“What I’m doing here… is building an empire.”

Calmness:

“I am afraid of panic. Turns out it’s bad for business.”

Adaptability:

“Business is changing and we must change with it.”

 

Made your guess? Did you think they are all by some business leader? Nope, they’re by a drug lord from the real world! Netflix’s series, Narcos – Mexico, tells the story of the Mexican drug cartels and their top boss, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. That’s quite a mouthful, so I’ll refer to him the way everyone in the serial does – Felix.

 

Before Felix, Mexico was splintered into rival groups, each owning a part of the country – this was called the ‘plaza system’. Felix managed to bring all the plazas under a single umbrella – for which, of course, he’d be the boss. But the plazas could still pull out of the arrangement anytime they wanted to, and it would take all of Felix’s “management skills” to keep it all together: massage their egos, mediate in their disputes, give them a bigger share of the pie, and of course, threaten them.

 

Felix was eternally looking for ways in which any prospective rival might outflank his “organization”, and was therefore willing to step into new “businesses” to pre-empt that. If not us, someone else will seize that opportunity, he’d argue when making the “sales pitch” to the plaza bosses.

 

At the end of a long and successful “career” though, the plazas decide they’d rather go their separate ways. And thus Felix ends up in a Mexican prison. During an interview with an American official, he mocks the US which thinks it has won the drug war. Referring to the now-independent-again plazas (regional cartels), he says:

“Now you’ll see what happens when you open the cage and let the animals out. You’re going to miss me.”

 

If you can set aside the morality of it, it’s hard to come away from that series without a huge amount of admiration, grudging though it be, for Felix’s organizational and operational skills. In a different life, he’d have probably made an excellent General Manager, hell, even a CEO.