Interactive Classes

by Olivia Cesio

By midmorning the participants enjoyed very intense debate in an atmosphere of lectures by distinguished speakers.

Wayra

Lorena Suarez is the Business Development Manager at Wayra. She has extensive experience in marketing, communication, and positioning strategy in the internet market. At Wayra they analyze more than 3.000 projects and finally invest in less than 1% of them.

During the class the participants introduced themselves and briefly told their studies and entrepreneurial interest/career. After that, Lorena presented the key aspects that must be included during a business project presentation, including: Business Model, Team Definition and Communication Skills.

Finally the class took a game dynamic where participants arranged themselves in groups and played to be entrepreneurs and investors. During the activity each group select a company, wrote a elevator pitch and presented to the rest of the class.

Bain & Company

Diego Garcia and Nicolas Masjuan, members of the Bain & Company Consulting group, started the session by stating that their competitive advantage, with regards to other consulting groups, is chasing tangible results for the client, materializing their vision. By hiring consultants aligned with the objectives of the Group, they achieve a growth superior to the one offered in the market, reason for the which they have been awarded the best consulting firm prize for 10 consecutive years.

The theme of the session was: “What is a strategy? It is a bridge that unites the contemporary situation of an enterprise with the future it aspires to achieve”. The typical sources of competitive advantage are: superior innovation, client fidelity, lower costs, synergy portfolios, organized structure and effective processes. Companies create sustainable value through clearly defined business models and by leading in their domain.

Later, it was time to define what makes a good strategy and how to achieve one. According to the speakers, it is all about ambition: how much do I aspire to work? where do I see myself in the future? which is my league? how do I win? what is my distinguishing property? how do I set priorities and implement an efficient action plan?

In conclusion, here are some quotes from the debate:

  • “A company’s success is defined much more by its strategy than by the market in which it competes”
    “Leadership generates superior results”
  • “A strategy’s goal is always to maximize the size of the nucleus that brought it into life”
    “The crash test of a strategy is client fidelity” – Successful companies have higher indexes of loyalty and recommendation
  • “A non implementable strategy is not a good strategy”
  • “Leadership should always lie on a competitive advantage”

Un Techo para mi Pais

Juan Pedro Pinochet is founder and CEO of Social Management, a consulting company specialized in social responsibility that advises companies all over the world on topics related to sustainable development. He was the Executive Director of Un Techo para Chile and Un Techo para Mi País for 12 years. During his tenure, the initiative became the main foundation of young, bringing together more than 400,000 volunteers from 19 countries in Latin America. John Peter also has extensive
experience in the corporate world: he has been CEO of Parmalat Chile and has also worked in the banking sector.

After going through the key issues to cover these topics in full: Shared Values​​, Citizen Participation, Horizontality, Connectivity, Environment; Juan Carlos deepened the concepts of sustainable development: “The progressive and continuous construction of our society, improving the quality of life care, preserving resources for future generations”.

This way, focusing on how to make social entrepreneurship and sustainable development converge, one of the keys is that the environment should be part of our social commitment. Social entrepreneurship has to have a purpose: to change the social or environmental reality. And for that to happen it is essential passion. Passion is a sense of urgency. Without passion nothing moves. Without passion projects are postponed. The passion invited to get involved today: “I am not resigned to the fact that when I die the world continues as if I had never lived.”

Ignacio Bossi

********The speaker began his talk explaining that coaching is a tool to bridge the gap between a goal and today’s reality. He also said the coach must start from the following statement: “I have no idea what reality is, I only know how I’m interpreting it.” Related to this, he added: “We have been raised in a world of objectivity, and to change the rules of the game have to change to a world of subjectivity”.

Then he explained that people perform six kinds of plays (statement of facts, judgments or interpretations, orders, offers, promises and declarations), focusing on the judgments or interpretations as a key to coaching.

Moving into the political coaching , Ignacio tells that a coach is a facilitator of the changes that the politician wants to see. He creates a “mirror” for the politician or their teams. Trust must be build between with the politician and the coach so they can openly share their thoughts, but he adds that it is quite challenging because the political relations are generally based on mistrust. After that he proposed ​​a game in pairs in which this two roles were played; the coach’s goal was to notice the politician’s interpretation of reality.

Finally, he listed the different traps that keeps people to reach their goals, and in that sense he concluded: “You have to change the script of the movie of your life, to change the reality you have to be the main character.”

Pablo Bereciartua – Sustainability & Design Thinking

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******Pablo, director of Management & Engineering in ITBA, summarized possible ways of sustainable urbanization. The world cannot keep growing perpetually. Current rates of growth are indicating that we are entering a new phase. One cannot grow alone: “The only way to play the globalization game is to innovate, to create value”. Thus, we need network, agglomeration.

Life in the city is excellent in terms of access to goods and services but, unfortunately, unsustainable. In the next 30 years -suggestions are that- urbanization will reach 70%. This phenomenon doesn’t come alone. The question is not how much, but how. “There is a tremendous lack of symmetry”. We are facing “two cities”: Urban and Slum.

“So far, economy has been the queen and technology the tool”, sustained Pablo, but this paradigm is changing rapidly. As we approach our Wicked Problems (capacity, pollution, garbage), the system generates complexity. It is not just about green, it is about maintaining it alive and prosperous. Pablo summarized suggesting collaborative solutions: a sharing economy.