Alejandro Ruelas-Gossi stated the need to globalize and innovate as the only way to grow in a competitive environment.

Photo: Manuel Castells

On April 13, Alejandro Ruelas-Gossi gave a session at the Directors' Forum organized by the Fundación business Universidad de Navarra.

Ruelas-Gossi is a prominent Mexican speaker with a long professional career. He holds a PhD in International Strategy from the University of North Carolina and a Master's Degree in Technology management from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He has also worked as Vice President of Quality and Productivity at the CYDSA group in Mexico and as General Manager of Planning and Control at Cemex, and has been a consultant for several Fortune 500 companies, such as Sony, Motorola, Microsoft, Bristol-Myers, IBM, Philips, Caterpillar, Cemex, Baxter and Ernst & Young, among others. He is currently a professor at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile.

In his lecture, Professor Ruelas-Gossi presented new perspectives from which to look at business reality. With numerous examples drawn from his professional experience, he showed how some of the paradigms that are taken into account today in the world of management, in this case from Michael Porter, have become somewhat obsolete. He introduced the concept of strategic orchestration, which he defined as "the process of intelligently coordinating nodes (individuals, business units or companies) in order to offer a more complex value proposal ", with statements that he would later qualify, such as "the worst thing you can do is listen to the customer" or "any industry can be attractive, it just depends on what you do with business". "In that sense, it is no longer about achieving strategy in equilibrium, but about creating disequilibrium. The concept, which confronts an egocentric vision of business, also generates many opportunities that can only be seized by a network," he added.

Along with this topic, Ruelas-Gossi questioned other aspects such as benchmarking, the search for efficiency or the "pathological tendency" that organizations sometimes have towards linearity.

He also stated the need to globalize and innovate as the only way to grow in a competitive environment in which the essential thing is to invent new ways to generate value by making skill adapt to you. In this sense, he commented that "if all artists had the mind of an entrepreneur, there would be thousands of 'Mona Lisas', some cheaper than others, some better made than others, but all similar". 

Finally, he highlighted the role being played by emerging countries. In this regard, he said that "The new global champions emerging from emerging countries are not finding better answers to the old strategic questions. They are changing the question itself: they are no longer thinking about how to optimize traditional value chains, but about how to create and coordinate networks to capture opportunities that others do not see".

Since last year, the Fundación business Universidad de Navarra has been organizing the Directors' Forum, an initiative created in partnership with group AN, which aims to address from a practical point of view some of the problems that companies face on a day-to-day basis.