What business school taught a change specialist about reinvention

More than most, Sérgio Maria’s career has been about changeover and transformation. In a doing work life supporting common businesses navigate the upheavals of new technological innovation, he has also rethought his very own route together the way.

For additional than a 10 years, the forty eight-year-aged senior digital government, who lives in São Paulo, has labored with organisations adapting to digital disruption and innovation, initial at Google and now with Brazilian media and leisure group Rede Globo. All the although, creating the abilities to set himself in others’ sneakers, divine their business enterprise desires and communicate how he can assist has been at the centre of his career.

Through 12 decades at Google, Maria’s main function was creating associations with publishers, including newspapers, broadcasters and stores. “In 2011 in Brazil, the information industry was really averse to Google,” he remembers. “I could not have a discussion with a newspaper CEO — they would not even answer to my calls.”

The icy reception was understandable. At the time, digital was decimating the common information industry. Readers were finding their information on the net, advertisers were adhering to them and the print revenue product was struggling.

In opposition to this backdrop, the Brazilian was tasked with finding spots exactly where the competitor could grow to be a collaborator. He joined Google as a strategic spouse manager and ultimately rose to grow to be director of global partnerships for Latin The us and Brazil across broadcast, information and commerce.

“Google has the advertising profits job that competes with all the other teams for advertising budgets . . . and that is how it is likely to function eternally,” Maria acknowledges. “But I was in a group that was looking at the other side — which is, how can we assist these companions build by themselves, be additional productive in the way they do their business enterprise and also crank out revenue?”

He also labored with journalists, describing how to mine Google information for investigative function he taught publishers how technological innovation could assist them understand users’ behaviour and he assisted optimise cell items. The global accumulation of these types of function grew into the Google News Initiative, which supports journalism in the kind of a training centre and an innovation fund, for illustration.

Immediately after 12 decades at Google, Maria was at a crossroads. If he stayed, the up coming action would be a move abroad, in a new job and tradition. That did not healthy with his private strategies, so he made a decision to just take a career split, spend time with his family — he has a few sons — and replicate on his up coming move.

Occupations, he states, are a a few-phase journey. At the starting, professionals’ abilities have a tendency to be additional specialized. Then they may well grow to be people today supervisors, offering up substantially of the useful function and creating abilities in leading teams and creating a vision. The third is the government stage, looking at businesses strategically in the long phrase.

Maria was completely ready to changeover to the third phase. So in 2018, although at Google, he enrolled for the counsellors progress programme, a corporate governance course, at Fundação Dom Cabral business enterprise faculty in Brazil.

“It was proper for that minute in my career,” he states. “It permit me devote some time to understand the strategic job of boards much better and how to then impact the management group of the organisation.”

People really should be ready to stay offline and hook up to the people today on the course and the course alone

The programme, which he concluded at FDC’s Belo Horizonte campus, prepares long term board members. Together with training the concepts of management and governance, it explores how to implement this — for illustration, participants get ready for and guide mock meetings of administrators.

The return to official mastering was “amazing”, Maria states. His career split intended he was spared balancing family, function and examine in the course of the course, which was taught in two week-long blocks a couple of months apart. This allowed him to have interaction fully, he adds, something that people wondering about government courses really should be completely ready to do.

“People really should be ready to stay offline and hook up to the people today on the course and hook up to the course alone,” he states. “It is anticipated that you take part a good deal and there is actual worth in bringing your working experience. It enriches the discussion and the useful exercises.”

This also usually means pupils really should share any complications or spots for enhancement with classmates. “Be current, be honest and be fearless,” Maria states. “The additional you are open, the additional people today will be capable to assist you and you will be capable to assist [other] people today.”

A single of the benefits was creating a solid community of like-minded friends, and Maria continues to assist people today stay in contact as a class ambassador.

The programme has assisted in his job as director of new business enterprise progress at Globo, which he begun final June. “It’s not the particular specialized matters that I use,” he states, “It is substantially additional of a state of mind change on how to glimpse at and method matters in the long operate, looking at what is in the minds of executives and the board.”

There is actual worth in bringing your working experience. It enriches the discussion and the exercises

Globo may well be Maria’s most significant obstacle still. As element of its digital transformation, the company declared final year that it was bringing some of its businesses alongside one another in one particular group, including broadcast and cable tv businesses, its site and online video on-demand support.

Together with the inside change, Maria is doing work on creating this new media technological innovation business enterprise for advertisers. “The opportunity is how to integrate all these mediums,” he states, so that advertisers can communicate their messages seamlessly across all of Globo’s channels. For illustration, he adds: “Can we glimpse at the journey when people today move out of Tv and go to an app to proceed consuming the articles?”

This method and details would assist advertisers understand what concept is effective ideal exactly where and when. It also benefits shoppers, he states, in that adverts really should sense significantly less jarring if selected in these types of a way.

“We nevertheless serve interruption,” he states. “But we will need to make interruption substantially much better in a way that is connected to the articles and to what is related to people today.”

It was the scale of the obstacle that persuaded Maria to just take the job at Globo. When the chief government presented his vision for the business enterprise, a few elements clicked into place: the stage of transformation a realisation that Maria could use his training in digital and speedy-transferring environments and finding something that he was superior at and fired up about.

“I mentioned, ‘OK, a few or five decades later, if I glimpse back again and we were capable to employ the stage of transformation that the vision states, I’m likely to be really very pleased of that.’ And which is a legacy I’m likely to go away. Chatting about a media group, it is really a legacy that my kids are likely to know about.”