In 2011, I was at a Google event in Sao Paolo and among the guest speakers, there was Torrence Boone, Vice President at Google now. Labels are not important here, but what he presented is: instead of showing 2-minute video cases of some of the great stuff his company did, like everyone has been doing for quite some time now, he took the time to talk about failures. Not only talking about projects that failed (he showed Google Wave as an example), but the process the company has to identify when things are not going well with a product. After him, others came and guess what? Hit the play and problem solved.

What happened there, Mr. Torrence being the only exception, is what I see happening for a long time with portfolios as well. It’s always the good stuff, the beautiful and perfect projects. A fairytale of creativity. One might even put up a project they didn’t even contributed to. You've seen that as well, right?

So I chose to do the opposite. No visuals, but stories. Personal / professional learning stories (the two go hand in hand) as a way of having a different perspective when talking about the work I’ve done. Going through some moments of my career and taking a straightforward view of what became a sort of mark that lead to change, specially those moments when things didn't go as expected. I believe portfolios are overrated, so this is a minor attempt of disrupting such a small piece of what I see as a much bigger process.

There is a lot more I would like to share. If you’re interested, just drop me a line and we can meet for a coffee, a beer or a Skype chat.

See you on the other side.

Rodrigo Bardin
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