Guatemala

How it came about

My father spent his entire working life in the coffee trade. Trade was never an abstraction in our house, it was everyday life: harvests and prices, ports and contracts, partners in countries that showed up in school at best as a footnote.

The connection to Guatemala itself came through my mother. She is from there and is still deeply rooted in the country. Together with my father's coffee trade, that made for a childhood in which both ends of the same supply chain sat at the dinner table — the side that buys and the side that is bought from. The name del Valle comes from her.

Coffee is a good teacher. It grows in one place and is drunk somewhere else entirely, and in between sit people, weather, currencies, logistics and a great deal of trust. If one link in that chain fails, the best plan at a desk is worth nothing. Grow up with that and you never mistake global supply chains for a slide in a strategy workshop.

Hamburg and Guatemala have been linked by this commodity for generations — one as a major European trading hub, the other as a growing region whose highlands rank among the best in the world. That I work in Hamburg today and call Guatemala my second home therefore has a certain logic to it.

So I did not learn Spanish, I spoke it before I ever thought about it. Part of the family still lives there. Guatemala is not a destination for me, it is a place you come back to.

Trade used to connect the world. Now digital does too.

The job has changed less than it looks. It used to be ports, contracts and shipping lines; today it is systems, data models and processes. Either way, the work is bringing together places that know little about each other and moving them toward shared rules. That is exactly what I do in transformation programs today.

What of it shows up in the work

Growing up bilingual is not a hobby you keep up on the side. It changes how you read organizations. Some of it turns up in nearly every project.

• No standard is self-evident

  Once you have seen the same procedure run completely differently in two places, you plan global rollouts differently. Harmonizing processes is not imposing headquarters on everyone.

• Trust comes before the plan

  In many cultures collaboration grows out of relationships, not out of the project plan. That is not softness — it is the reason change lands on the shop floor, or does not.

• Supply chains are people

  Taken from the coffee trade: a chain rarely breaks at the system, it breaks where someone was left out. That shapes how I map processes.

• Conversations without a translation layer

  Spanish is a native language for me: workshops, interviews and difficult conversations in Latin America and Spain run without an interpreter — which saves time and, more importantly, changes what people tell you. English is not my native language, but after a school year in Detroit and many years on international programs it is my third working language.

The country, briefly

Guatemala is smaller than the state of Tennessee and still one of the most varied countries in Latin America: more than twenty Mayan languages are spoken alongside Spanish, volcanoes define the horizon, and the coffee from the highlands is among the best there is.

Guatemala City pulses. Antigua is the place you no longer want to leave after two hours. Volcán de Fuego really does erupt, not just on postcards. Lake Atitlán ranks among the most beautiful lakes anywhere, and at Tikal you stand in the middle of Mayan culture instead of reading about it. And those are only a few places out of many.

Guatemala in motion

If you have never been: the official film by the Guatemalan tourism institute — landscapes, cities and culture in a few minutes.

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Source: "Video INGUAT Guatemala", Instituto Guatemalteco de Turismo (INGUAT), YouTube channel tvinguat. Watch on YouTube