Positive effects on your brain
When I was ten years old, my mother supported my idea of learning music in the youth school of the local municipal band. There, I was able to learn music theory and eventually learned how to play some instruments. I started playing the trumpet, then the clarinet and finally the alto sax. My grandmother would later gift me with a saxophone, a guitar, and some other instruments. I now enjoy this and share it with my children. In school, I continued a technical career and finally studied electronic engineering at the university.
I am grateful for my mother and my grandma for immersing me in the world of art and music since I was little. With time I could see that beyond the beauty of art, it made me see the world from another perspective. The right side of the brain (the creative side) probably coexists with the left (the logical one) in a more harmonious way. The development of visual and sound arts is especially useful for a brain, which with time tends to be verbal, logical and mathematical.
Perhaps this harmonious combination defined my professional future, not so much linked to hard engineering, but more so to business and management. The more technical or structural components in music allowed me to understand from a practical point of view how things happen in the business world. Especially the investments, to which we pay special attention in order to go after them, optimize them and reduce their risks.
Rythm and investments
We generally call rhythm to the combination of figures and silences that serve as a “skeleton” to a melody. There may be shorter or longer sounds, as well as shorter or longer silences. There may also be shorter or longer investments or shorter or longer periods without investments. Even though the rhythmic base is usually about a year, a patron that those who invest frequently use.
Rhythm appears in all arts because it is one of their most basic characteristics. In the art of business, if we tune our rhythm to theirs, it will make us sound “on time”.
Then there is the melody, as the most visible element of a musical piece, that which the ear can identify more easily. And when it comes to the right industry, the right customer, and we have the right services and products, it is “music for our ears”.
Even though it is less perceptible than rhythm or melody, harmony is a powerful tool in the composer´s hands to give a better body or substance to the music. It is the part of the music that regulates the sonorous relation between a melody and its accompaniment. That is why all those products or services that can accompany the proposals for the main investment harmonize everything.
The timbre in business
Physically, the timbre is the quality conferred to the sound by the harmonics that accompany the fundamental frequency. In the business behind large investments, the timbre is all those stakeholders that make each negotiation different, even if it is the same industry and similar clients. The song and the instruments are different, with their own particular timbre. The sounds we hear are complex, meaning that they are composed of several simultaneous waves, even though we perceive them as just one. Businesses are also complex, and in Oil & Gas, there are always many actors that we must know how to listen.
For a pure sound, the tone is mainly determined by the frequency, and this is where we must understand for the Oil & Gas industry how investments (CAPEX) happen, with general operating expenses (OPEX). These are interrelated as the pure sound of the main tone and its harmonics. Or we can also interpret it as the main rhythm of the song, and the rhythm of the percussion or any other instrument accompanying.
The intensity of investments can be interpreted in a similar way, considering the intensities of the main investments, the secondary investments and the general operating expenses, such as the intensity of each one of the notes, or of each instrument of a masterpiece, which is directed by the orchestra conductor.
How to achieve a masterpiece
Oil & Gas operations often go through complex conjuncture moments, of the rules of the local market or the international market. However, it is known that investments are long term and that they include high risks. So the rhythm of the investments must be perfectly orchestrated in order to create a masterpiece.
