Stand and deliver: tough times? Hard choices? Bring it on, say Latin America's most capable young CEOs

Latin Trade, Feb, 2004 by Marianne Maldonado

Calculated risk. Like his Colombian colleagues, Bayer feels a responsibility toward his country, too. "We combine youth and calculated risk-taking with the studies of what needs to be done," Bayer says.

Similarly, in Venezuela, Vogeler presented a restructuring plan for the company he now presides over, based on a field study he did while completing a master's degree at Harvard. When he became CEO of Protinal-Proagro he sold two units that were not part of the core business--poultry--to reduce costs, concentrating instead on developing a marketing strategy to position the brand at the top of the market.

In eight months, the company doubled sales despite reducing headcount by 1,700. "With the equity raised by asset sales, debts were rolled over and we renegotiated with creditors," Vogeler says.

One of those creditors, AGP, a U.S. cooperative made up of 250,000 agricultural companies with $2 billion in revenues, became co-owner of Protinal-Proagro. "Our strategy was to get back to basics. We concentrated on the core business of the company and then went international," says Vogeler, who is also director of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce.

The 40-year-old CEO says that thanks to volatile governments and economies in Latin America, young people have had to take responsibility for risk. That responsibility has led to the drastic, if calculated, decisions that have positioned Protinal-Proagro as a dominant agricultural company in the region.

Azcarraga and Mendoza, on the other hand, have managed to break the traditional structure of their businesses imposed by preceding generations. In addition to improving their companies' way of doing business, generational differences have marked them as unusual young men.

Azcarraga inherited media giant Televisa, a typical Mexican family-owned business, where being boss meant being strong and distant. That's no longer true. The first action he took was a house cleaning of operations and a dismantling of hierarchical barriers, say recruiters.

Latin America's young executives no longer sit in a top-floor office, recruiters say. Instead, they are seen walking the hallways and personally training new work teams. Mendoza did something similar to Azcarraga at Venezuela's Polar. Before turning 40, he dissolved the traditional company structures built by his family, consolidated the company and carried out a tough restructuring, creating new businesses and buying new companies. Today, Polar's portfolio includes Quaker, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, and Frito-Lay. All this in his first five years as CEO.

What give these new business leaders such a potent combination of abilities is their broad academic and professional backgrounds. Many are engineers with masters in business administration (MBA) degrees from the United States, including Mendoza; Guillermo Aponte, country manager of Coca-Cola in Colombia; Eduardo Franco Mackenzie, president and general director of Oracle Colombia; and Mauricio Camargo, principal consultant at McKinsey & Company, also in Colombia.