Someone must understand that their task is to guard an asset that no longer belongs even to this century, but to the future of Panama. They must possess the emotional maturity that Daniel Goleman called a kind of soft skill that becomes critical infrastructure for leadership. When speaking of the Panama Canal, it is not enough to think about the knowledge economy, proven career paths, or short learning curves. The Canal is not governed by a form. They must know when to decide and when to listen, not only to the pulse of the market, but to the heart of the nation. The Panama Canal does not need only the best, most efficient, or most experienced operator. And in loving the Canal, no one can beat the Panamanians. The author is a researcher and coordinator of the historical memory of the Panama Canal. They do not govern for their term or for a government; they sustain public trust and the Canal's reputation as a high-value asset. No matter how large we are or can become, no one who has not internalized that memory can legitimately guard an asset that is, at the same time, infrastructure, a national heritage, and an unfinished project facing the future. It is about their ability to manage the actions that every Panamanian has entrusted to us. Paraphrasing Yuval Noah Harari in '21 Lessons for the 21st Century,' the administrator of the future relies on predictive models but does not delegate their decisions to a machine or an intelligence that only reasons, not feels. This leadership will, necessarily, be Panamanian, because managing the Canal requires an intimate understanding of the history and the generational significance that the interoceanic route has for the country and the planet. It is a living organization that manages a historical promise, not between two countries, but one made 49 years ago between Panama and the world. Therefore, the requirements for whoever leads the canal's destiny cannot be posed as an exclusive and dichotomous list of 'meets or does not meet.' Managing it, of course, involves maintaining locks, lakes, flows, transits, tolls, and operational resilience, which is just the visible layer. This leadership is born from the very heart of the nation, so it must manage many pieces at once and in connection with a structural order that transcends titles, laws, and regulations. Therefore, the challenge is not just to maximize a metric or an operation, but to guard a destiny that, by making the road as we walk, we have built institutionally. Canal leadership is not exhausted in what one knows how to do, but in how one understands what is being guarded. Reducing Canal leadership to technical credentials, operational experience, or managerial efficiency is to confuse the work with its destiny. Because the Canal is not only a 20th-century engineering feat, nor a sophisticated 21st-century logistics platform. What we don't know that we don't know constitutes a gray area that demands that the future administrator understand how power circulates beyond the organizational chart, how legitimacy is built in contexts of distrust — even when they are unjust for our country — and how every technical decision is, in the end, a political one. Not out of partisanship, but out of understanding where tensions in interests arise and how to manage them, practicing integrity and remaining consistently whole. The canal leader will require presence, not just analysis. Because a leader who loves the Canal knows that this work has a personality: that of each user, of each Panamanian man and woman. A Canal named Panama, managed by a 'superman' or 'superwoman,' is not what is required. To listen to its beats to connect more with its heart. And, without a doubt, from now on, they will only be able to love it. All of that matters, without a doubt. It is not just about net profitability, strategy, or logistics — that is what we know that we know. But it is not enough. Because, as Freire said, no one who does not love can teach about love. It is also a complex system called Areas of Responsibility: hydrographic basin, operational areas, and heritage, which do not float in a vacuum, but on a living and populated territory, loaded with history. It is also a symbol that generates cultural identity and pride for generational struggles and for a quarter of a century of management of the waterway in Panamanian hands. Someone who understands when the norm serves and when it limits, who knows how to create value despite the orthodoxies that sometimes the Organic Law and the Constitutional Title generate, and who understands what it means to operate on a snapshot of the past, giving way to innovation without falling into arbitrariness. They must know how to respond to unprecedented crises, in most of which the manual does not exist. In the race are the best, and without a doubt, they meet the main requirement: it doesn't matter where they come from, if they are from here or there, they know where they are going. And in its 82-kilometer journey, whether north or south, they must pay attention to the inside of each lock, to its people and its basin. This leader must transcend the emotional. The era demands a complex subject, as proposed by Edgar Morin, capable of thinking systemically. Michel Foucault taught us that power is not exercised only from institutions, but from interconnected networks, coherent between thinking, saying, and doing. But even so, it is not enough. They must see interdependencies.
