Lojas Americanas: Project DNA and the 'People Machine'

Lojas Americanas (“Americanas”) was one of the largest retailers in Brazil. Via its stores, digital platform and Innovation Engine, the company served more than 38 million people. In recent years, Americanas had enjoyed rapid growth; growing from 98 stores in 2001 to 1,700 stores in 2019. As each store had its own manager, and there was a growing need for district and regional managers, meeting these human resource needs had become an increasingly large challenge. Compounding this, one of the company’s core talent management principles was that store managers should be hired from inside the company. This challenge was the genesis for what became known as Project DNA. Via Project DNA Americanas executives aimed to: determine empirically the extent to which store managers impacted store performance; identify those characteristics that differentiated a good manager from an average one; and create a leadership training program to develop and reinforce those characteristics. To date, approximately 1,500 managers had participated in the training, and while it was still early days, initial results had been impressive. The question for Americanas’ management was: what could be done to improve and update the project? And, could the learnings of Project DNA be applied elsewhere?