Are multinationals getting the best leadership and professional talent when they recruit in Brazil and other emerging markets? In one sense, yes: These companies can generally hire the most-expensive, best-educated graduates in these countries. But their high standards may actually be keeping multinationals from taking full advantage of the talent on offer.

In Brazil, many multinationals outsource the preliminary screening of trainees, with the requirement that candidates must speak English. This is how 70% of a million candidates for 4,500 trainee positions are filtered out every year by the recruiting company Cia de Talentos. And when multinationals hire for more senior positions, they are mostly just poaching from each other — and thus restricting themselves to the same limited talent pool.

In a relatively poor country where the spoken language is Portuguese, fluency in foreign languages is the privilege of the upper middle classes. By limiting hiring to those that show proficiency in English, multinationals are severely restricting career opportunities for the poor and thus ratifying a history of exclusion. This seems in line with the view that it is not up to the corporations to educate the workforce. But it also means that multinationals are shooting themselves in the foot.

Because Brazil urbanized rapidly and recently, fertility among women has dropped quickly. Families of four or five children are now rare. Each child is worth much more to a family than used to be the case. In addition, rapid urbanization has brought urban violence. Upper-class and middle-class families do not want to expose their precious children to the streets. These children thus grow up sheltered and clawless in closed playgrounds and private schools. And it is they who, once they graduate from university or business school, form the recruiting pool for multinationals.

To guide business schools teaching strategy to undergraduates, I recently organized a roundtable of headhunters, business magazine editors, and representatives of Cia de Talentos to figure out what was lacking among young management professionals in Brazil. Two missing traits that came up repeatedly were “perseverance and resilience.” Those are precisely the qualities that are lost to overprotective upbringing.

This loss is difficult to make up for at a business school. It calls instead for a change in recruiting strategy to look to less privileged environments where the families cannot overprotect their children. There the candidates are unlikely to be as educated, and are generally lacking in English proficiency. But these abilities can be learned.

Mixer, a prominent Brazilian producer of audiovisual content for network television and publicity agencies, has followed this approach in recruiting producers. Mixer partnered with the philanthropic initiative Instituto Criar, which puts about 100 hundred poor and disenfranchised youngsters through a TV training program for a year. Mixer has hired about 30 of them per year to complete their on-the-job training — and is now a successful, 400-employee company with private equity backing.

Multinationals should also be considering such paternalistic approaches to recruiting — for their own good. A partnership between business schools, the recruiting companies and multinationals is likely to render a more effective workforce, improved social justice and greater diversity at the subsidiaries of multinationals in Brazil. Multinationals would absorb part of the cost of developing abilities by business schools, and recruiting companies would learn how to develop a new hunting ground. Cia de Talentos is aware of the shortcoming and is poised to change. Multinationals must be willing accommodate.

CONSULTE MAIS INFORMAÇÕES SOBRE ESTE TEMA: Valor Economico

LINK PARA A TRANSMISSÃO: http://www1.fia.com.br/mkt/mesa_redonda/webcast.html?utm_source=htmmesa&utm_medium=html&utm_content=eventograde&utm_campaign=webcast

O trabalho “DIFFERENT REACTIONS OVER SUMMER RAINSTORMS EXPRESSED IN A SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICE SUGGESTS THAT THE WAY TO APPORTION PREVENTION AND MITIGATION FUNDING HAS TO BE DIFFERENT THROUGHOUT BRAZIL” representa uma distinção alcançada na colaboração entre a academia, no caso a FIA, e uma empresa, a Climatempo, para sugerir uma política pública mais eficaz na prevenção e mitigação de desastres naturais.

Argumenta que o fatalismo presente nas favelas da mata atlântica fluminense poderia ser responsável pelo maior número de fatalidades nelas,  para a mesma intensidade de chuva, do que na região da mata atlântica de Santa Catarina, onde a população apresenta maior grau de autonomia individual. É recomendado que se distribuíssem verbas de prevenção e mitigação de catástrofes naturais não apenas em função do risco natural mas também levando em conta a relutância da população em tomar conta do seu destino.

Premiado no IV Simposio Internacional de Climatologia em João Pessoa, 19 de outubro de 2011.

Autores: Ana Lucia Frony de Macêdo, Alfredo Behrens, Angela Ruiz

Carta: Carta_Premiacao

A FIA tem uma parceria com o Global Mindset Institute, da Thunderbird School, para oferecer analises sobre capacitação de equipes e executivos de empresas  para atuação internacional, com preços e vantagens especiais para a comunidade FIA.

O GMI acabou de receber uma doação de um ex-aluno no valor de U$ 2 Milhões e está ampliando suas atividades e instalações, passando a chamar-se de  Najafi Global Mindset Institute. 

Conheça este produto e para mais informaçções, entre em contato com alfredob@fia.com.br

”Prof. Alfredo Behren’s very engaging book on management in Latin America is now available also in e book format. Alfredo is one of FIA’s very creative faculty, who brings many diferent insights into management issues.  Check it out ! ” Prof. James T C Wright, Director of International MBA (FIA Business School)

Product Description

”Highly engaging, exciting and thought provoking…Professor Alfredo’s mode of inquiry is unique and the style of presentation has a rhythmic flow… The distilled wisdom derived from the study of great heroes of South America has many pertinent lessons for corporate leaders. I highly recommend this book to corporate leaders, educators and scholars” Dr P. Singh, Professor of Eminence, MDI-Gurgaon, India.

”Professor Behrens has collected a series of excellent lessons from Latin American leaders and presented them in an engaging dialogue style. The insights he develops will be applicable to those interested in leadership across the globe. Whether you’re interested in the leadership legacy of Latin America or leadership in general, Shooting Heroes will deepen your leadership understanding.” James Clawson, Johnson & Higgins Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, The Darden School, University of Virginia.

”Shooting Heroes is more than an important Latin American book; it is a refreshing take on leadership that will be relevant across the globe. Behrens’s authentic dialogue carries the reader through the rich legacy of the Latino gauchos, a legacy ripe with lessons that any modern manager will want to put to use immediately.” Suzy Welch Former Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review and Co-author of “Winning”, with Jack Welch.

In this book I call foreign subsidiaries in Latin America by the name of saladeros.

”At saladeros people are sapped of their energy, of their will, of their desire to become; there, all creativity is beaten off them until mediocrity is installed through conformity. This is why I have called such places saladeros, places where people jerked beef while they unwittingly salted themselves out of life in the process. The preserving technology may have changed, but the slow kill process has not.”

This is a story on Latin American autochthonous leadership and management told through two gaucho protagonists, Martin Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. The story is grounded on real 19th century popular revolts across Latin America because they allow drawing lessons on how people were led and managed effectively before American Scientific Management took over business schools and practice there.

The core purpose of the book lies in showing how the culture of the people of this region of the World shapes their expectations as to how they wish to be treated at work. The need for a better tuning of leadership and management theory and practice to the people is signalled by the increasing amounts of grassroot political leaders that have sprung up in the region in the last decade: Brazil´s Lula, Venezuela´s Chavez, Bolivia´s Evo Morales, Peru´s Umala, Paraguay´s Lugo, Uruguay´s Mujica and others. In voting for unfashionable political leaders the people are also telling us they do not like being managed like if they were foreigners in their own land.

The increased pressure for more culture-friendly management techniques and more appropriate leadership styles is the likely shade of the next stage of the expanding politician and business change wave.

The book reveals effective leadership and organizational traits which have been long neglected by North and South American business schools. It informs in an enticing manner, through a dialogue between the two gauchos while riding on horseback from the Southern Pampas to Northern Mexico.

Click here to watch his interview at iEco

A Mecatron Projetos e Consultoria Júnior promoveu no dia 17 de maio, das 18 às 23h30, no auditório 5 da Faculdade de Ciências Médicas (FCM) da Unicamp o evento Diálogos Universitários.

No encontro tivemos a participação de Rodrigo Pimentel, ex-capitão do Bope e escritor do livro ”A Elite da Tropa” e Alfredo Behrens, professor do International MBA da FIA e economista com PhD na Universidade de Cambridge.  

Saiba mais sobre todo o evento: aqui

Chuvas de intensidade semelhante, em áreas de terreno parecidas, levam a um numero de mortos no RJ dezenas de vezes superior ao de SC.

Leia o artigo onde os autores sugerem que a cultura mais fatalista do carioca exposto a riscos tomem menos medidas preventivas mais tarde do que populações com características mais empreendedoras, como a de Santa Catarina. Isto conduz a menor proteção dos individuos e a um maior numero de mortes. Clique aqui: Rainstorms in Brazil

INTRODUCTION

Income, geography and institutions are believed to mostly account for the casualties arising from natural disasters (Kahn, 2003). This paper argues that culture shapes people´s attitudes to natural disasters as well as the efficacy of the institutions they entrust to prevent and mitigate the effect of disasters.

Brazil is a country with a strong national identity is large enough to display a variety of sub-cultures partly as a consequence of the diversity of the immigration currents that contributed to its current 190 million population stock. This work assesses two similar rainfall cases in 2011 and measures the casualties in two geographically separated population areas, with similar terrain morphology in the continent;   assesses their different cultural background through meta-analysis of the literature and by interpreting the victims’ spontaneous statements on a facility provided in Facebook by Climatempo, Brazil´s largest commercial weather forecasting corporation. The analysis suggests that funding for storm readiness should be apportioned by the people´s cultural disposition to take charge rather than only by degree exposure to natural risk, because different peoples respond differently to the same events.

Willingness to face natural events and their consequences stem from people´s culture. Culture is slow to change but once its role is identified the adequate amount of resources to counteract negative attitudes can be ascertained.

Cultures which favor a perception that the control of people´s destiny is in their hands pay more attention to weather forecasts, build better refuges and resort to them in timely fashion (Sims & Baumann, 1972). Other cultures, the fatalist prominent among them, favor perceptions in which people´s lives are at the mercy of events beyond their control and they do not feel as guilty about the consequences of not taking prevention measures.

Brazilian landslides and flooding during rainy seasons are common. During January 2011 two severe rainstorm episodes took place in developed urban tropical areas, causing landslides and floods during the night. The differences in the reactions of these two populated areas are analyzed here from the perspective of their spontaneous messages on Facebook.

Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro state, is Cfb climate in the Köppen[i] classification, and is about 1000 kilometers NE of (continental) Florianopolis, Santa Catarina state, Cfa climate. Both are built on the steep sloped mountain range called Serra do Mar, along the Atlantic Ocean.

Social networks provided an important resonance box to the victims’ plight. A partnership between climatempo.com.br, the largest weather information provider in Brazil and Facebook.com created a space to post messages which provided the data for a cultural assessment of the differences in attitudes to severe storms and their consequences.

Por Alfredo Behrens, Profesor de Liderazgo y Gestión Intercultural en FIA, Sao Paulo.

Un error común es acercarse a un mercado emergente con un producto viejo. Más frecuente aún es acercarse con la misma mentalidad que sirvió en el mercado de origen. Es un error antiguo.

Le tomó a los portugueses casi un siglo de exploración para finalmente llegar a la India a fines del siglo 15. Cuando llegaron al mercado de Calicut se dieron cuenta de que las mercancías que habían traído para vender no despertaban el interés de los locales. 

Sin embargo, en sus varios intentos de rodear África, los navegantes portugueses habían recogido información sobre el comercio en la costa occidental de África. Inclusive, aprendieron que se usaba como moneda una concha que allí era escasa pero que, más tarde descubrieron, abundaba en el Océano Índico.

Allí, los portugueses recogieron las conchas para pagar por mercancías compradas de los africanos de la costa Oeste. Así fue como los portugueses contribuyeron a la primera inflación de la que se tiene conocimiento en África occidental.

Hoy en día las multinacionales se enfrentan a una situación similar a la de los navegantes portugueses de hace cuatro siglos. Felices con los productos que tienen en oferta, las multinacionales buscan vender barato versiones “light” de sus productos en los mercados emergentes.

Al hacerlo, no se dan cuenta del máximo potencial que estos mercados tienen para ofrecer. Es una pena, porque si la mayor parte del crecimiento esperado durante el siglo 21 ha de venir de los mercados emergentes, desaprovecharlos es una forma de perder.

Las corporaciones que buscan hacer negocios en los mercados emergentes deberían desarrollar una mentalidad más abierta de la que mostraron hasta ahora, para entonces descubrir qué es lo que tiene mejor aceptación y para incluso aprender a organizarse en pos de producir y distribuir en esos mercados.

Por ejemplo, los refrigeradores domésticos vendidos en América Latina y en la India tienden a ser menores que los que se venden en los EUA. Pero eso no es suficiente para tornar los refrigeradores nuevos accesibles a las camadas más pobres, que es donde está la mayor parte de la población. Ésta debe conformarse con refrigeradores viejos y menos eficientes. Pasa algo semejante con los automóviles que son ofrecidos en el mercado de los países emergentes.

Pero resulta que en la India los refrigeradores convencionales no consiguen penetrar más que en dieciocho por ciento del mercado. Esto se debe a que en la India las familias pobres compran comida todos los días, no se dan el lujo de hacer hielo, solo necesitan preservar lo alimentos de una comida a la siguiente, se mudan de casa con frecuencia y también con frecuencia les falla el suministro de electricidad.

Para atender estas condiciones, una empresa local desarrolló una refrigeradora que no tiene compresor, que de tan pequeña y leve es portátil y que funciona hasta con baterías de automóviles. No llega a helar, pero tampoco lo necesitan.
Por otra parte, en Brasil las familias pobres permanecen más tiempo en sus residencias y tienden a compartir con los vecinos el espacio refrigerado de sus heladeras.

Allí se podría vender refrigeradoras convencionales nuevos que, por más modernos, consumirían menos electricidad. Y el pago mensual de la amortización del préstamo para comprarlas podría ser cobrado en la misma cuenta de electricidad, cuyo suministro es bastante confiable. 

Con esto mostré que atender la misma demanda por refrigeración de las familias pobres en países emergentes demandaría productos diferentes y modelos de negocios diferentes, además de algo de creatividad. 

Pero a juzgar por lo que venden y cómo lo venden, la creatividad parece ser escasa entre las empresas que venden bienes durables. Lo peor es que tampoco veo que las escuelas de negocios enseñen a sus alumnos a cuestionar los productos vendidos o los modelos de negocios predominantes.

America Economia

A FIA recebeu a Business School do Imperial College, Londres, para colaborar com a formação de seus alunos .

Esta é mais uma evidencia do excelente reconhecimento internacional alcançado pelo MBA da FIA.

Em 04 de abril próximo. Quarenta alunos do Imperial College serão recebidos pelo Prof. James Wright e terão aulas sobre ”’Brazilian:  Economics and Business Climate, prospects for 2011” ministrada pelo Prof. Simão Silver (PhD, Yale University) e sobre ”’Brazilian Cultural roots and its impact on business practice”’ ministrada pelo  Prof. Alfredo Behrens (PhD, University of Cambridge).

E tem mais: com vistas a um intercambio de estudantes, o International MBA da FIA receberá em 24 de março a visita da Diretora dos cursos do Fisher Business School da Ohio State University.

Recentemente colaboramos em São Paulo com a formação internacional de 30 alunos do Smurfit Business School do University College Dublin.

A FIA está se internacionalizando progressivamente e aspira se converter em referência Latino Americana para o intercambio de estudantes internacionais, posição para a qual tem considerável vantagem ao ser a escola de negócios latinoamericana melhor colocada no  ranking do Financial Times.

Em Março e Abril, a FIA (Fundação Instituto de Administração) foi contratada pelas escolas de negócios Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School de Dublin e Imperial College de Londres para apresentar aos alunos aulas sobre conjuntura econômica, raízes culturais dos brasileiros e a melhor forma de administrar.

Os temas, respectivamente, serão apresentados pelos professores Simão Silber (PhD , Yale University)  e Alfredo Behrens (PhD. University of Cambridge).

Este ano também lançamos a cooperação com Thunderbird Global School of Management para estender a mentalidade global dos executivos brasileiros.  Consulte-nos !

Coordenação: Prof. Dr. James T C Wright

contato: profuturo@fia.com.br

Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School,Dublin