Lesson #2: Understand the Future and Your Place in It

“I’m a paper man, not electronic,” says Helu. “My children gave me a lap top for Christmas, but all I know how to do so far is push the on button.” In university, Helu studied engineering. He can process numbers and formulas at a speed impossible for most. But, when it comes to using computers and the like, Helu is uninterested. He prefers to keep to himself in the drab basement of his two-story headquarters surrounded by the paper ledgers he has been using since he was a boy.

That does not mean, however, that Helu is ignorant as to the direction that modern technology is headed. He may be content with his paper laden office, but Helu knows that the rest of the world is not. It is to that end that Helu makes it his number one priority to understand which industries hold the most promise for the future, and, more importantly, for this money.

“Technology is going to transform people’s lives and society everywhere in the world,” says Helu. “I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what’s gong on and try to see where we can fit in.” To this end, Helu has invested in everything from cell phone providers to computer retailers and other technology-related companies, with a particular interest in looking for possible synergies between them.

In Helu’s business, being too early or too late is as good as being wrong when it comes to making an investment. That is why Helu insists on staying current about which new technologies are of the future, and which are of the past. For instance, he sees long distance calling as a commodity, and one which will not be around for long. “It’s not going to exist in a few years,” he says. “It’s going to disappear, and it will be the same thing to make a local call as a long-distance call. So we have to move into other areas.”

What Helu does see as the key, however, is the Internet, or what Helu calls, “the heart of this new civilization,” with telecommunications as its “nervous system.” It was because Helu considered the U.S. the most advanced country of the digital age that he chose to enter the American market and invest in CompUSA.

Understanding the future, however, does not mean completely forgetting the past. “I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization,” says Helu. For instance, while many retail groups are introducing e-commerce and phasing out their ‘bricks’ operations, Helu suggests that both the ‘clicks’ and the ‘bricks’ will continue to be important. “We think that there will be an ‘entrepreneurial reconversion’ of many companies that have lived in the industrial era and now are becoming part of this new [digital] civilization.”

Helu wants to make sure that Mexico is at the forefront of the new digital age, and he wants to be the one to take it there. It is only by constantly updating his portfolio and looking to the future that he has made sure he will have a place in it.



Lesson #2: Understand the Future and Your Place in It

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