What business school taught a change specialist about reinvention

Extra than most, Sérgio Maria’s career has been about transition and transformation. In a performing lifetime serving to regular firms navigate the upheavals of new technological know-how, he has also rethought his have path together the way.

For more than a ten years, the 48-calendar year-outdated senior electronic govt, who life in São Paulo, has worked with organisations adapting to electronic disruption and innovation, initial at Google and now with Brazilian media and entertainment group Rede Globo. All the while, developing the competencies to put himself in others’ sneakers, divine their small business needs and converse how he can help has been at the centre of his career.

Throughout twelve many years at Google, Maria’s core perform was setting up associations with publishers, including newspapers, broadcasters and vendors. “In 2011 in Brazil, the news field was quite averse to Google,” he remembers. “I could not have a discussion with a newspaper CEO — they wouldn’t even reply to my calls.”

The icy reception was easy to understand. At the time, electronic was decimating the regular news field. Visitors had been locating their news on-line, advertisers had been following them and the print revenue design was struggling.

From this backdrop, the Brazilian was tasked with locating parts exactly where the competitor could develop into a collaborator. He joined Google as a strategic lover manager and eventually rose to develop into director of international partnerships for Latin America and Brazil across broadcast, news and commerce.

“Google has the advertising and marketing income purpose that competes with all the other groups for advertising and marketing budgets . . . and that is how it is going to perform eternally,” Maria acknowledges. “But I was in a group that was searching at the other side — which is, how can we help these associates create on their own, be more productive in the way they do their small business and also create revenue?”

He also worked with journalists, explaining how to mine Google info for investigative perform he taught publishers how technological know-how could help them understand users’ conduct and he aided optimise cell merchandise. The international accumulation of this sort of perform grew into the Google News Initiative, which supports journalism in the form of a instruction centre and an innovation fund, for instance.

Soon after twelve many years at Google, Maria was at a crossroads. If he stayed, the upcoming stage would be a move overseas, in a new purpose and society. That did not healthy with his own programs, so he decided to acquire a career split, shell out time with his family — he has a few sons — and replicate on his upcoming move.

Professions, he claims, are a a few-stage journey. At the starting, professionals’ competencies are likely to be more specialized. Then they may well develop into folks professionals, supplying up a great deal of the realistic perform and developing competencies in foremost groups and setting up a eyesight. The 3rd is the govt degree, searching at organizations strategically in the very long phrase.

Maria was prepared to transition to the 3rd stage. So in 2018, while at Google, he enrolled for the counsellors improvement programme, a corporate governance training course, at Fundação Dom Cabral small business school in Brazil.

“It was suitable for that instant in my career,” he claims. “It allow me commit some time to understand the strategic purpose of boards better and how to then impact the management group of the organisation.”

Individuals ought to be organized to continue to be offline and join to the folks on the training course and the training course itself

The programme, which he concluded at FDC’s Belo Horizonte campus, prepares future board associates. Together with training the concepts of management and governance, it explores how to implement this — for instance, participants get ready for and direct mock meetings of directors.

The return to formal finding out was “amazing”, Maria claims. His career split meant he was spared balancing family, perform and analyze all through the training course, which was taught in two 7 days-very long blocks a couple of months aside. This permitted him to engage totally, he adds, a little something that individuals considering about govt courses ought to be prepared to do.

“People ought to be organized to continue to be offline and join to the folks on the training course and join to the training course itself,” he claims. “It is predicted that you participate a great deal and there is authentic value in bringing your practical experience. It enriches the discussion and the realistic exercises.”

This also means students ought to share any issues or parts for improvement with classmates. “Be present, be genuine and be fearless,” Maria claims. “The more you are open, the more folks will be capable to help you and you will be capable to help [other] folks.”

One particular of the benefits was setting up a sturdy community of like-minded friends, and Maria carries on to help folks continue to be in touch as a class ambassador.

The programme has aided in his purpose as director of new small business improvement at Globo, which he started very last June. “It’s not the particular specialized issues that I use,” he claims, “It is a great deal more of a mentality transform on how to seem at and strategy issues in the very long run, searching at what is in the minds of executives and the board.”

There is authentic value in bringing your practical experience. It enriches the discussion and the exercises

Globo may well be Maria’s major obstacle however. As element of its electronic transformation, the corporation announced very last calendar year that it was bringing some of its firms collectively in 1 group, including broadcast and cable tv organizations, its website and online video on-need company.

Together with the internal transform, Maria is performing on setting up this new media technological know-how small business for advertisers. “The option is how to integrate all these mediums,” he claims, so that advertisers can converse their messages seamlessly across all of Globo’s channels. For instance, he adds: “Can we seem at the journey when folks move out of Tv and go to an application to proceed consuming the content?”

This strategy and information and facts would help advertisers understand what message functions finest exactly where and when. It also benefits customers, he claims, in that adverts ought to come to feel fewer jarring if selected in this sort of a way.

“We continue to provide interruption,” he claims. “But we need to have to make interruption a great deal better in a way that is connected to the content and to what is applicable to folks.”

It was the scale of the obstacle that persuaded Maria to acquire the purpose at Globo. When the main govt introduced his eyesight for the small business, a few things clicked into location: the degree of transformation a realisation that Maria could use his instruction in electronic and quickly-moving environments and locating a little something that he was fantastic at and thrilled about.

“I stated, ‘OK, a few or five many years later on, if I seem back again and we had been capable to implement the degree of transformation that the eyesight claims, I’m going to be quite happy of that.’ And that is a legacy I’m going to depart. Chatting about a media group, it’s basically a legacy that my children are going to know about.”