Vontade Inabalável by Maria Silvia Bastos Marques; a review

Bruce Springsteen (on Broadway) reminisces nostalgically about starting out in the business as a youthful, unknown rock star. `I miss the beauty of that blank page and of its endless possibilities`. `That blank page just laying there, daring you to write on it`.

I considered the analogy to fill in a blank page to be the epitome of Maria Silvia`s driving force during her long and successful professional career. She simply embraced recurring blank pages, relentlessly curious, unfazed and fearless. She rolled up her sleeves and got the job done. Some of her daunting accomplishments (this is only a partial list) included restructuring the Brazilian Government`s Sovereign Debt obligations post default, spearheading the privatization of State industries that were considered `sacred cows` , assuming the Presidency of CSN, Icatu Insurance, Municipal Olympic Committee, BNDES, and (her present role) CEO of Goldman Sachs Brazil. Along the way she also assumed board positions at Vale, Petrobras, Pão de Açúcar, Anglo American plc and Marsh McLennan. The lady’s not for turning.

Vontade Inabalável is also an excellent management book that sets out the author`s challenges at her various postings; many of her proposed solutions were successes but the author is honest to share her missteps. I especially enjoyed reading about her mentors` counsel. An example of which is the Sloan School of Management/MIT professor Arnoldo Hax`s seemingly innocuous question `What does CSN produce?`. His insightful observation debunked the rote `we sell steel` and replaced it with the insightful `CSN sells cars, washing machines, houses and packaging`, The paradigm shift challenged CSN`s executives to deepen their understanding of their clients` end products to ensure that they could be true business partners engaged and relevant throughout their clients` production lines. By keeping closer to their clients, CSN would become aware of alternative options to steel that could eventually reduce the demand.

Since the financial/political crises there have been an exodus of the ex-pat community fleeing Brazil. The wounded executives whined that things were just too hard, nothing worked, there was too much red-tape, everything was too expensive, taxes are exorbitant, the business community was a closed network, blatant corruption prevailed, no one was professional, the longest business plans never exceed 12 months etc..

Therefore I would like to suggest that a 2nd edition of Vontade Inabalável might include a translated edition and could possibly include an accompanying appendix that describes and places in context the various economic and political hurricanes that Maria Silvia needed to navigate during her leadership appointments. Vontade Inabalável should be required reading for any multinational who is thinking of appointing an expatriate CEO to lead their Brazilian operation. Maria Silvia has shown the band width that`s needed for a successful CEO to address the plethora of local issues to efficiently administer and set a strategic course for a profitable enterprise. I hope that the multinationals might appreciate, as Tom Jobim once quipped, that Brazil is not for amateurs.

A compliment to this review is this brief video that interviews the author

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider clapping. It means the world to the author.