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Latin America

Latin America

Appreciating One’s Humanity as a Leader

 
Pictured: Karen Bruck, a vice president at MercadoLibre, is the protagonist of a case highlighting the challenges of helping employees to succeed.
Danyel O’Connor (PLD 32, 2021), the executive vice president for sales and marketing at Good Foods Group, is the type of leader who believes in constant learning—from colleagues and mentors to her professors and classmates in the HBS Executive Education program in which she participated, Program for Leadership Development (PLD). “I know that I am far from a perfect leader, and I want to continue to develop to best support my team and my company,” she says.
Pictured: Karen Bruck, a vice president at MercadoLibre, is the protagonist of a case highlighting the challenges of helping employees to succeed.

But through her nearly 20 years in the perishable food industry, she has not frequently encountered other leaders who share her experience and her perspective as a woman and a mother. That’s why one particular case, “Karen Bruck: Growing Managers at MercadoLibre,” has resonated with her.

The new case, written by Professor Joshua Margolis with Fernanda Miguel and Mariana Cal of the Latin America Research Center (LARC), is about a difficult personnel decision Bruck, a rising star in the Argentina-based Amazon rival, faced. In 2017, as corporate sales director at MercadoLibre, she managed a smart and dedicated employee who did not fit the company’s leadership culture—she was seen as too direct and combative. After months of trying to find the right fit for this employee, Bruck had to make a choice: Would she leave her in her current role, transfer her to another position, or fire her?

“We wanted to better reflect where our students are coming from and where they are going to—in terms of biography, geography, industry—all the different dimensions.”
Joshua Margolis
Chair, Program for Leadership Development
James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration
“We wanted to better reflect where our students are coming from and where they are going to—in terms of biography, geography, industry—all the different dimensions.”
Joshua Margolis
Chair, Program for Leadership Development
James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration

When Margolis, the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration and chair of the Program for Leadership Development, presents the dilemma to his Executive Education classes, the students are usually evenly divided regarding the best course of action, but it is in the class conversation that the true lessons of the case emerge.

With the help of the LARC, headed by Miguel, Margolis sought out a protagonist that was not only charged with developing employees, but was also at a pivotal moment in her own development. That’s a situation in which many PLD students find themselves. Choosing Bruck—a Uruguayan mother of two on the fast track in a rapidly growing tech company in South America—was also a step toward diversifying the protagonists represented in the classroom. “We wanted to better reflect where our students are coming from and where they are going to—in terms of biography, geography, industry—all the different dimensions,” Margolis says.

Bruck, who is now vice president, marketplace, Hispanic South America and Retail and Private Label, at MercadoLibre, hopes the case will help students understand that human experiences and emotions are an important part of leadership. “We are not machines,” she says. “Just acknowledge that and don’t be so hard on yourself for not acting like the result of an equation.”

That was the valuable lesson for O’Connor, who saw many similarities between her and Bruck. Through her career, O’Connor had always felt pressure to be a “wise old sage”—a stereotypically male definition of leadership. “I never felt like I fit into that mold,” she says. “Through PLD, I came to realize there are all sorts of different types of leaders who are perfect for different organizations at different times. I just need to be the best version of myself.”

Pictured: Karen Bruck, a vice president at MercadoLibre, is the protagonist of a case highlighting the challenges of helping employees to succeed.

Alumni Help Students Advance Their Careers

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During the pandemic and the disruption in business worldwide, HBS’s Career & Professional Development team made an appeal to alumni and recruiting partners that resulted in nearly 1,000 new full-time and internship opportunities for students in a few short months. Additionally, alumni continued to engage with HBS students and drive career opportunities, as seen in the connection between Eric Westphal (MBA 2021) and Diego Dzodan (MBA 1999), which led to Westphal’s summer internship in 2020 at Facily, a company founded by Dzodan in São Paolo, Brazil.
→Career Opportunities Story
Pictured: Eric Westphal (MBA 2021, left) and Diego Dzodan (MBA 1999, right)

HBS Online Offers a Social Entrepreneurship Challenge

In May 2020, Harvard Business School Online (HBS Online) announced a partnership with Sustainable Harvest International (SHI), kicking off the second annual Community Challenge. The goal was to reverse the effects of climate change by helping SHI scale its business operations in Latin America and create ventures that offset financial costs and increase farmers’ benefits. Of the eight HBS Online Community Chapters that submitted proposals, the one from Los Angeles was chosen because it took the organization’s existing model and combined it with the earned-income component it needed to scale.
→HBS Online Blog Post
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