Nacho Corredor: "There is also activism in the offices"

Nacho Corredor is a political scientist and founding partner of the BeBartlet consultancy. He is also a political analyst on various television and radio programs and talk shows. He studied at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) where he used his free time to found Deba-t.org. He has worked in the public sector as a government advisor and in the private sector as a consultant for Llorente & Cuenca. Consulting has given him mental order, method, and business.

He has been chosen as one of the emerging leaders in Spain, according to the British Embassy, and in 2022 he wrote the book El activismo tranquilo (Ariel), which is a subjective manifesto in favor of coexistence. "Taking a stand without being partisan." To the party! Or rather: to the interview!

--- Born in Cantabria, raised in Catalonia, and working in Madrid.

--- I would still like to be more in Barcelona... One day you told me it was the best city in the world and I think it is the best city in the world to live in. Opportunities must be created for it to also be the best city in the world to work in.

--- Why did you study Politics?

--- I was 17 years old and interviewed politicians on Canal Blau TV. Guillem Carol read the interview I did with Carles Campuzano during the 2008 general election campaign and told me he wanted to meet me. Guillem studied Politics at UPF, was a member of FNEC, and introduced me to a group of people who, for me, were a new world of politicians and people who dedicated their daily lives to talking about politics. It was inspiring.

--- "When inspiration comes, may it find me working," Picasso used to say.

--- I started frequenting UPF before enrolling as a student. I did research on Rodrigo Zapatero's peace process with ETA, and the Ernest Lluch Foundation gave me an award. The jury told me that if I liked political journalism, I should study Politics and then Journalism.

--- Two old acquaintances: politics and journalism.

--- Later I decided I didn't want to do political journalism because journalism describes political reality, but I was more interested in the tools I acquired in the university ecosystem, which enriched me greatly. It was the moment of the 15M effervescence in Spain, and I wanted to participate in public affairs.

--- You were president-founder of Deba-t.org.

--- We founded Deba-t.org fifteen years ago and it still works today. We invited politicians and businessmen with the aim of generating complicity among people who thought differently. Some media outlets like El Periódico had the vocation to incorporate new voices into the ecosystem. I was 21 years old and started to be a columnist, it made me dizzy and I went to Madrid.

--- Barcelonian vertigo?

--- I was a recent graduate giving my opinion on the human and the divine and I thought that had a very limited trajectory. A professional opportunity came up in Madrid and I left. Since then I have continued to participate in public affairs and have contributed to the media as a form of quiet activism or civic commitment. The media is the work of journalists and liberal professionals do not participate because that way they save themselves problems.

"I approach public debate from a respect for difference and with a vocation to build and not to destroy. Debate as a format does not have a vocation for the transaction of ideas but for exposition and this does not interest me much"

--- Sharing your opinion in public has its costs, even though I do it and it doesn't cause me that many problems. It's my way of approaching public debate from a respect for difference and, therefore, with a vocation to build and not to destroy. Intelligent people respect that there are intelligent people who think differently.

--- What is most important for a good debate?

--- Listening to each other is basic. The structure of debate is not normally made for listening but for speaking. It's very clear in an election campaign. Very few listen to what others say because the debate as a format does not have a vocation for the transaction of ideas but for exposition, and this is true that it doesn't interest me much.

--- Listen before speaking.

--- Exactly. I am interested in spaces for deliberation or exchange of knowledge. One of the problems of political dynamics is the publicity given to debates. Broadcasting agreements in streaming may seem transparent, but it is a format for not building. The debates that make the most sense are those where people listen. Empathy is very important in the construction of public conversation and coexistence.

"Empathy is very important in the construction of public conversation and coexistence"

--- Unfortunately, empathy is not prominent in public conversation. At the end of July, I was at the Nueva Economía Fórum and we were talking about all the pacts that could happen after the elections. A couple of people approached me, surprised because I didn't treat them like Martians.

--- Martians? --- Public conversation is rather destructive, but one of society's maxims is to coexist, and that's why we must listen, understand, empathize, and assume that we have to share a space and time in a context of people.

--- Why did you start BeBartlet, a public affairs firm?

--- I worked for four years as a consultant at Llorente & Cuenca, which is now one of our minority shareholders. I learned a lot, and consulting is a space where you have to be for a while, but not too long because it's very intense. Consulting gave me mental order.

--- Mental order.

--- My tendency is not mental order, but consulting gave me method and business logic. It's quite a challenge to sell a professional service insofar as it implies trusting someone and that person's ability to generate value. Afterwards, I worked for a couple of years in the Administration, coinciding with Pedro Sánchez's motion of no confidence. My day-to-day changed from one week to the next. There were two elections in 2019, the structure of the interim government was somewhat stalled, and I had time to think a lot about what I wanted to do.

--- The dream and reality of entrepreneurship.

-I coincided a lot with Adrian Jofre, who also came from the consulting world and had just returned from the United States. We wanted to do something different and launched BeBartlet just a couple of weeks before the pandemic.

--- What is competitive intelligence?

--- Companies have to make decisions and need to interpret the information they have access to. During the procés, I helped many multinationals make decisions about where to invest by analyzing political risks in geographical areas. I had a great time because I worked with people like José Antonio Zarzalejos or Jordi Sevilla. My clients were multinationals with a presence in Spain or Spanish companies with an international vocation. Executives received an alert with relevant and contextual information beyond the noise that is accessible to everyone, and we also helped them make decisions and act in moments of tension.

--- What does a good leader need to have?

--- I am not too much of a leadership theorist because I believe that the best leaders are forged over time but are not the product or consequence of a methodology. Thus, I believe that inspiring leaders must have great consideration for their community. They must respect those who treat them with respect.

--- Mutual respect between leaders and community.

--- It is not common... In fact, it is a way of generating a dynamic and a logic of participation, integration, collaboration, co-creation, and above all cooperation, which is the best way to compete. A leader must know how to cooperate, think long-term, and share a space of coexistence. Our participation in a community has an impact on the societies we build. One of the books that has inspired me the most is titled Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam.

"The best leaders are forged over time and have great consideration for their community, but they are not the product or consequence of a methodology"

--- This book explains that the most democratic societies are those that interrelate and dedicate time to generating complicity and trust among all those who think differently. Someone might say that this is a frivolity like networking, but its contribution to public debate is that this relationship between different people generates Bridging Social Capital, which means bridges between societies that need interrelationships.

--- Tomorrow's leaders are no longer like yesterday's leaders. --- The passage of time helps us learn and do things even better. There are leaderships that were admired in the 20th century and that today would be completely intolerable, especially those leaders with authoritarian tics. However, surely there are leaders with authoritarian tics that are attractive in our historical imagination. Margaret Thatcher was authoritarian. The generational vector explains many things about social dynamics because power is exercised from generation to generation, but I believe that age is not a determining factor for almost anything.

--- Age is just a number.

--- A 70-year-old person recently told me that I was very young and I replied that José Maria Aznar was president of Castilla y León at only 34 years old or that Felipe González was general secretary of the PSOE at only 32 years old. I asked this person what he was doing at 30 years old and he told me that he was CEO of a bank. So, time had passed for him and he understood youth from the logic of his passage of time.

--- "Youth, divine treasure," wrote the poet Rubén Darío.

--- Youth is often taken as a determinant and differentiator, but it doesn't have to be that way. Do older people have more experience than younger people? Perhaps yes, or perhaps no. There are also older people who have had a very boring life, without emotions, without love... The passage of time contributes to perspective but is not an attribute in itself, just as the absence of the passage of time is not a demerit.

"The most democratic societies are those that interrelate and dedicate time to generating complicity and trust among all those who think differently"

--- Both Adrian Jofre and I are only children and we didn't like it at all when they put us with the younger cousins at Christmas dinner. We wanted to eat at the adults' table because that's where interesting things were heard and learned that perhaps we didn't understand then. There is an attempt to compartmentalize young people, but it is a way of limiting and controlling the exchange of knowledge within a society while generating negative externalities in public conversation. Let the child not bother us, they think, but the child learns when interacting with adults.

--- Praise for growing youth.

--- Democracy is very recent in our country and was built with the generation of the late 70s and 80s. These are the people who have led our society until almost a decade ago and who always appeared on television or ran companies. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba was the great exponent who had been a minister in the 90s and was also a presidential candidate in 2011. The financial crisis, 15M, the appearance of Podemos or Ciutadans meant a change in the media and in politics.

--- Give me examples.

--- The president of the Generalitat or the president of Madrid began to hold office when they were under 40 years old. Politicians like Pere Aragonès or Isabel Díaz Ayuso or presenters like José Yélamo or Marc Calderó have not gotten to where they are because they are young, but because they are professionals and have found the opportunity to play an important role in society.

"Power is exercised from generation to generation, but I believe that age is not a determining factor for almost anything"

--- If we mention the biological state, we are essentially caricaturing the contribution of these people to society. Does Pere Aragonès act as a young person in the Generalitat? No, but he prioritizes certain post-material values compared to what Jordi Pujol had in his imagination and imbues a generational logic that has nothing to do with his age. Pere Aragonès does not interest me insofar as he is the voice of young people, but rather he is a symptom of an era.

--- What is quiet activism?

--- Quiet activism has to do with civic commitment and the way of relating to society. Quiet activism is a book I wouldn't have written, but which I was asked for after a conversation like this with my editor. I told him I wasn't too sure because I didn't want to write a political science book where I had to translate foreign concepts. He told me to explain what I had done at university and how a community of trust had been generated among new institutional references from different parties. The editor told me that this was a form of quiet activism.

--- "Taking a stand without being partisan."

--- We have an aggressive or demanding conception of activism. An activism that is found more on the streets than in offices, when probably a person who wants to go to a demonstration and another who dedicates their free time to society can also understand each other and generate complicities despite having different visions. It is the shared commitment to the environment.

--- How are the relations between Barcelona and Madrid?

--- Political relations are not at their best moment, although there is a very short physical distance between the two cities. There is a constant business exchange. A waiting room at the Air Shuttle or some AVE trips are a good radiography of the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. Many of my clients live in Barcelona, but spend a significant part of the week in Madrid. We should aspire to also have people from Madrid come to work in Barcelona.

--- The capital effect...

--- It is true that there is a capital effect that conditions the economic power of each city and there is also a strong administrative structure that generates an economy of offices, consultancies or restaurants around it. Although Madrid has had a more comfortable leadership position, Barcelona has also lost opportunities during the last decade.

--- Why?

--- Perhaps because it is the best city in the world and there was no need to believe that it had to be taken care of. Business and cultural ecosystems are a consequence of the decisions made by both people and institutions. I would like the ecosystem of opportunities that a city like Madrid has to also be in Barcelona and for Barcelona to be a magnetic pole in southern Europe without competing or comparing itself with Madrid. Barcelona is a pole in terms of identity, but it has not necessarily been so in terms of praxis.

"A waiting room at the Air Shuttle or traveling by AVE is a good x-ray of the transition from the 20th to the 21st century"

--- In the last decade, very bad decisions have been made in Barcelona, such as, for example, living in a context of permanent uncertainty that has not contributed to the territory. Barcelona is the best city in the world, but there are also many cities that have a port, that are located in the Mediterranean and that provide facilities. Barcelona is criticized above all for not having been synonymous with certainty and for not having made things easy at a business level. You don't have a winning recipe if you mix uncertainty with difficulties.

--- What is the winning recipe?

--- We have all the elements to be the ideal ecosystem. Thousands of years ago, when someone had to settle on the Iberian Peninsula, they did so in the Mediterranean rather than in the center of Spain. Here, bad decisions have been made due to uncertainty and difficulties. We have to be aware of the opportunity of a time that passes very quickly. The loss of opportunities today has a much greater impact than during Barcelona's good years, between the 90s and 2000s. It has been negative to put the city on pause between 2010 and 2020.

--- To what extent?

--- The city's elite has used this diagnosis to attribute all responsibility for everything that happened to politicians and, in this process of likes and dislikes of the institutional ecosystem, we have also damaged part of society's reputation. We have read in the international press criticisms of the city of Barcelona from people who live, work, invest and dedicate their lives to the city of Barcelona.

"We have read criticisms in the international press of Barcelona from people who live, work and invest in the city. The virtue and defect of Madrid is that they believe in themselves"

--- Do we lack more public-private collaboration?

--- Public-private collaboration is essential for the economic development of cities and cannot be limited to a private company providing a service to the administration and the administration paying for this service. This is not public-private collaboration, but a tender. This must also continue to be done, but public-private collaboration means that the public shares a diagnosis of needs with the private sector and they do things together to solve it.

--- What role should the private sector play?

--- The private sector has a great capacity to attract investments and Barcelona Global is a good example of an organization dedicated to generating dynamics of collaboration between the public and private sectors. We must move towards societies that normalize interaction, collaboration, and joint work between the public and private sectors. We must demand more public commitment from private entities and more relationship with citizens from public entities. We cannot leave public-private collaboration as a mere contracting by the public administration to private entities because this is a transaction that generates economic activity and a positive externality, but it is not collaboration.

--- What is your information diet like?

--- I am a subscriber to five media outlets: La Vanguardia, El País, El Confidencial, El Diario.es and Infolibre. My way of accessing the reality of our country is through its protagonists, who are the primary sources. It's the same as what we talked about regarding community building and interaction between different people, but applied to the bubble of Madrid society.

--- How do you access primary sources?

--- I prefer to have dinner rather than a business lunch. I meet with many politicians and journalists for meals, as well as with other people who are connected to their space of current affairs generation. Appearing in the media allows you to have an interaction with someone you don't know while generating civic engagement. Surely there are people who, if they didn't appear in the media, wouldn't agree to meet with me, but the truth is that it allows you to talk to the protagonists.

--- How do you manage this information?

--- During the days leading up to the general elections, I had many conversations with many involved people, but I didn't do it with a journalistic vocation to publish what they explained to me. I didn't want to be a journalist because I realized that I wouldn't have been a good journalist in the sense that I believed that to get to the bottom of some conversations, it was better not to have an information transaction, but a vocation to share knowledge.

"I didn't want to be a journalist because I realized that I wouldn't have been a good journalist in the sense that I believed that to get to the bottom of some conversations, it was better not to have an information transaction"

--- Knowledge that is acquired, passed through a filter, and reinterpreted from the logic of taking a stand without being partisan, and from the subjectivity of a person with a certain age, experiences, and ideology. It is enriching. I have made a list of people to meet and books to read. This is my way of accessing information.

--- What is the present and future of the journalism business? --- Large media outlets have structures that were conceived in the past and are the ones that have the most difficulty adapting to other economic logics. There is a whole world of possibilities with platforms and new media. Advertising is a world in transformation and ads as we know them no longer make sense. In fact, I am surprised that there isn't yet more of a business model through wealthy individuals who have a civic commitment and contribute to an ecosystem of higher quality information and greater capacity for interpreting current events, in the same way they contribute to an NGO.

--- The Jeff Bezos formula with The Washington Post.

--- An informed citizenry with the capacity for interpretation generates a context of more stability, more predictability, and better scenarios for the economic world. Therefore, I am surprised that there are not more initiatives from people who understand that quality information, access to knowledge, and analysis have an impact on the society we build. More money should be dedicated, even if it means losing it in the short term.

--- The previous interviewee of Persona a Persona, Oriol Pinya, asks you the following questions:

1) How do we refound democracy in a world polarized by the filters imposed by social networks? --- When we analyze, a few years from now, the impact of the Internet on the configuration of the public space in the last decade, we will throw our hands up in despair. I prefer a human with technological criteria to organize information for me rather than reading disorganized things on Twitter that don't interest me.

2) What is the real power of Twitter?

--- If Twitter is truly a contemporary public agora then we cannot act as if it were a shoe factory. Twitter is a corporate space shared by many people that conditions the mood of many countries. Any liberal would have to see a problem in the fact that there is such a large concentration of power on Twitter and that it is the channeler of political conversation for a part of the world. At the same time, this network is in the hands of a person who controls a company with a governance problem and without any kind of check and balance. Twitter and Facebook are not a shoe factory.

3) How will the social media revolution be?

--- These types of spaces will not work in the future, otherwise we will move towards more dystopian contexts. Democracy has always been based on a fallacy that we have happily accepted and that has served us to organize ourselves quite well.

"Twitter and Facebook are not a shoe factory"

--- The fallacy of perfect information on the part of those who participate in the decision-making processes of democracy. When it is said that people who vote have perfect information, it is a lie, and this makes us see increasingly dangerous things. I am referring to everything that contributes to misinforming, over-informing, or making it difficult for us to form our own judgment about what surrounds us. The challenges of 2023 are more complex than those of 1900, and they will become increasingly so.

5) Quo vadis Catalonia and Barcelona?

--- Catalonia without Barcelona would not be Catalonia. The direction Barcelona takes conditions Catalonia. Barcelona has begun a new and difficult time to manage from the institutions, but it deserves that antagonistic logics have the capacity to share a diagnosis. This is what allows for the integration of different visions of the city and a long-term project. The logic of diversity and antagonism between two visions has not been integrated when prioritizing what the city's challenges should be. We must think about the Barcelona of the future among different people and logics that will stand the test of time.

SEVEN OF LIFE - Referent: Pasqual Maragall. - Book: Alice in Wonderland. - Film: La Dolce Vita, by Fellini. - Song: Agapimú, Ana Belen & Ojete Calor Feat. - Favorite spot: Somewhere in Menorca. - Life motto: Better a bad agreement than no agreement. - Dream: Live 100 years and dedicate half to reading.