Former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, Pushes Mexico To Become Technology Hub

Recently, I was thrilled to be invited to meet with former Mexican President Vicente Fox at his presidential library, the first for a Mexican president.  Among the many opportunities he has pursued is to develop a Charlie Rose-style interview program.  I was a guest on his show, and he agreed to return the favor.

Fox’s story is an extraordinary one.  He rose from delivery route supervisor to President of Coca-Cola Mexico. He was elected as Governor of Guanajuato after first serving in the federal Chamber of Deputies. As he explained in my interview, he did not grow up dreaming of being President of Mexico.  Rather, he got involved because he had grown so frustrated with corruption.  He won an improbable victory in on his 58th birthday, July 2, 2000. In this interview, we spoke about his major accomplishments as president, the importance of thinking strategically, the transformative power of technology, as well as a variety of other topics.

(To hear an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the tenth interview in the IT Influencers series.  To read past interviews in the series with Sal Khan, David Pogue, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and Sebastian Thrun (among others), please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: As we sitting here in Centro Fox, the first presidential library in Mexico and a center for education and exploration, I thought we would begin with the objectives of Centro Fox.

Vicente Fox: Our vision is that leaders, persons with a name and a face, are who change and build the world that we live in much more than institutions. So if we believe in leadership and that it can change the fate of Latin America, this can be changed.

We are a Latin American Center is geared around ideas, leadership, and strategies. We do it through, number one, young kids. The middle-upper class and the rest have access to the best universities. But the broader constituency does not receive any messages or aspirations of happiness in life at home. What they get, it seems, is the message to be poor all of their lives or be migrants and move all around the world. That is the core of what we do, academically, as a think thank, and as a social institution committed to the poor. We tackle the issues of education, poverty, health, and housing, which are the main four ingredients that people need to have a better life.

We have a program, for instance, called President for the Day where we bring up to 500 kids a day, 60,000 a year, to give them that message to try and change their minds. We wish we could have a “next experience,” but for the moment it is enough; they go back home saying, “I can be President” or “I can be an architect”. We also do some think tank in relation to public policies that we take to government. Thirdly, we are also concentrated on gender equity, which in Mexico as well as Latin America is a weakness.  It is a passion, so every single one of our programs has an emphasis on women and gender equity.

High: Walking the grounds here, and speaking with you I have been impressed by the role that technology plays. Can you talk a bit about your big vision to make Mexico a hub for technology?

Fox: We ran across a corporation that was in the process of expanding to Latin America and Europe. I had the fortune to speak with the CEO and convince him that he should have a second headquarters – one is in India where they have 14,000 IT people working for them – here, in Mexico in Centro Fox. The plan here is 10,000 jobs, they are celebrating 900 that have been contracted in the last 18 months. We have a very clear agreement here; we are not partners of the corporation. We have an agreement that if I help them, personally, to get into the market and partner with large Latin American corporations, the company will donate a percentage of every dollar income to Centro Fox.

Now that we have gotten into it we are starting to spread the message, working with communities around here, and with the CEO in trying to develop seminars and a master’s program that has relationship to the company. At the very end we want this place to be the cluster of information technology for the country, including the United States because this service can be provided at much lower cost. Mexico has a very strong competitive advantage as opposed to India, in that it can be speaking at the same time with customers of the United States much faster. I think this project has a very bright future.

Former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox

High: I would be remiss not to mention your time as President. You won a historically significant election and defeated, for the first time in 71 years, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) against incredibly long odds. Can you talk a bit about how you used your marketing experience, as a former Coca-Cola executive, in your Presidential campaign?

Fox: First of all, it was not in my plans to move from private sector to public sector, but I was up to my neck with Mexico’s authoritarian government, lack of transparency and accountability, and corruption controlling the economy. That’s the story all throughout Latin America; the 20th century was lost because we were in the hands of dictators. We didn’t grow as citizens—we stayed childish.  I wish we could have spread, all throughout Latin America, the profound philosophy of the United States: you go as far as your own work and you build your own future, you just have to grab the opportunities.

When I came there, being a private sector executive, I had a plan to use all of those techniques that had brought great results in the private sector. For instance, I hired my Cabinet through headhunters. That is unique, that has never happened in the world. So every single guy who joined my cabinet went through two headhunters. I was criticized, but I think it was a great idea and worked quite well.

In the campaign for state government and the presidency I used a lot of marketing. Doing Coca Cola, fifteen years, that is what you learn. And it worked. Of course, it was in the surface of each Mexican to decide for the change. I just had to scratch a little bit, and people would join me and would be glad to contribute to the change. Through marketing we got there. Also with government plans and strategies, I thought it was very important that we shared and communicated plans with our citizens, which had never happened in the past. I thought it was important that everyone knew where we headed to and what we were doing everyday.

High: One of the things that striking to me in reading the Revolution of Hope, your book, was the importance of planning and setting goals. Can you talk a bit about the importance of setting big goals and building that path towards reaching them?

Fox: Two concepts here. One is the business concept of planning, which is so crucial and important. That can be simplified by saying, “this is where I am, and that is where I want to go,” so you have to build a bridge to get to that place.  That is a very basic concept I relate to government. I know all governments have a five-year or ten-year plan that they present, but it is nonsense.

This concept is associated in your question to one profound Jesuit philosophy that I have. That is that we are all leaders, but most of the time we don’t discover our leadership or potential.  The best way to solve that is to have heroic aspirations; the higher you can have your objectives, the more you are going to grow. Many people don’t believe that but it is absolutely true. I use the example of the 90 days in silence that Loyola invites his followers to take. First you start by resolving the questions “who am I, what am I in this life for”. Once you have that, you know where you are going and have a purpose and all of your energy, talent, and physical strength move in that direction.

The first time, when the postils that Loyola had there finished he told them “you, Javier, go to India. Pedro, you go to China,” and none of them asked questions. They just obeyed orders, followed there inner power and force, and they conquered to become successful. So that is something I deeply believe in and was my case when I joined Coca Cola starting as a route supervisor. I started working with that high aspiration. When I decided one night that I was going to move from the private sector to the public sector, I said “I am going to be President” and that is what happened. I had to work my way up, but it happened.

High: You are, in some ways, a citizen of the world as much as you are a citizen of Mexico. I wonder, how much do you draw upon all that you know from around the world?

Fox: Migrants are a very special caste, very special people. The courage, guts, vision, purpose, and commitment they have make them very special people. Like my grandfather, who was the assistant to a butcher in Cincinnati, Ohio. He worked in the backyard sacrificing the hawks. He didn’t like so much blood and noise of the hawk when being sacrificed, so he decided to move down south. With the spirit of the American dream, he came down south to find that dream.

This very special caste of people, migrants, has so many abilities and capacities. Look at the way it happened in Ireland when it became problematic because of pests, wars, and unemployment, they said “let’s move up” and went to Strasbourg. Why in Strasbourg? Because the migrant has a very easy way to smell out where the action is. They knew Strasbourg was a crossroads—a point of intense and dynamic development in Europe. Eventually they had to leave and went to the United States. That nation has been built all along by migrants, those who came from Asia and Latin America. That is what has made that nation not only strong but diverse and capable.

I think it is a very shortsighted position of migration that building walls, putting minutemen in Arizona, and crossing the border is absolutely wrong. But hopefully, Congress will soon approve that reform that has been sitting there for ten years so that the United States can keep being the leader in the world by solving cultural barriers.

High: In many ways, this is one of the many tragedies of 9/11. Returning to your six years of presidency, I wonder if you can reflect about your time in office and some of your proudest accomplishments.

Fox: There were objectives in mind. One of them was to end up with this map of crises that we were going through in Mexico and Latin America. Mammoth devaluations, huge interest rates, up to 180 percent a year, inflation rates over a 100 percent— all of that had to be stopped. So I looked for the best Finance Minister and he did a great job. We became a very disciplined economy, the goal was to reduce the deficit from 5 percent down to 0; we accomplished that. We also wanted to align the economic fundamentals between the Mexican and U.S. economies; so today we have the same interest and inflation rates.  Our convergence on the fundamentals created very strong support for the Mexican economy.

Number two, I wanted extend the programs on education, health, and housing to be real opportunity for all Mexicans. We grew housing from 250,000, when I came in, homes built to 750,000. The stock exchange moved 350 percent up. Also, we had big problems in a lot of the things we wanted to accomplish. One I am not proud of is bringing more opportunities to the poor. To me, my Jesuit education showed me that the shortcut to happiness is being for others and doing things for others. So I know there are a lot of things that we couldn’t accomplish.

Also, the airport. Unfortunately, at that time, we couldn’t build that airport. Finally the big airport will be built, but we lost eighteen years. If opposition had not opposed that airport we would have had it ten years ago. The same with the energy report I proposed.  This is a big problem with being a minority government.

We tried hard. I think the future is bright for Mexico today. As you know, I changed my support from my own party to the PRI. Many people tell me that I am not consistent, but I think that ideologies and partisan positions are like little boxes that reduce individual freedom. I learned in Asia that ideologies and political parties are not anymore the controllers of political life. Today, a good government is that which creates jobs and makes the economy grow—a very pragmatic government. I see the United States with only two political parties, one side trying to destroy the other, and never reaching agreement, except when you are at war.  I don’t know why the United States has to go to war everyday and everywhere.

There is the same thing going on in Mexico where democracy is not delivering because of conflict in political parties that has delayed strategic decisions for eighteen years. My agreement with Pena was that if he proceeded with reform of education, energy, and telecom, then I would back him up. With that agreement I have worked with him and supported the team.
 Fox: We conquered the lack of democracy and freedom, which happened in all of Latin America for the last two decades of last century. So it was not just Mexico, it was all of Latin America getting rid of the pigs. That brought us into a new era with real possibilities of growth and development. It is so true that in the last ten years poverty has been deflated by 18 percent in a region that has over 500 million inhabitants. That is a lot, a great accomplishment. Now we are on our own and have to have our own efforts, not expect anything from other governments.

High: You’ve spoken eloquently about the need for reform of economies in Latin America. What is your analysis of where things stand there, are you optimistic? 

This result is not only from conquering democracy and freedom, but is also from China. China is drawing so much food, grain, cattle, minerals, and oil from Latin America that has really caused Latin American economies to grow. If you look at that growth, you notice that Mexico did not do as well. Mexico is more of a manufacturing economy, and so deeply linked with the United States that we did not perform well. But the future is Mexico, and the problem is for Latin America because China is not growing more slowly. If that bonanza of those years working with China had been instead invested in education, infrastructure, or manufacturing facilities, then the future would be theirs too. But they didn’t do that.

That has been very fortunate in Mexico, what has given us the possibility to be the strongest manufacturing hub in all of Latin America but also the most competitive worldwide. Today you manufacture at a much better price and quality in Mexico than you can get in China. Many companies that have left Mexico ten or twelve years ago to produce in China, but most of them are coming back.