Francisco Souza Homem de Mello

"This way, the company generates an actual framework with which to make everybody “row in the same direction.” From the big dream, the company breaks down company-wide yearly goals, and then CEO goals, VP goals, Director goals, all the way down to the factory employees, who are all aligned by targets derived from the company’s Big Dream."

"The magical figure, according to him, is that 80% of an employee’s goal/gap (or the company’s, for that matter) has to be achievable with the skills presently owned by him. The other 20% are the stretch that makes the employee go the extra mile[21]. Brito summarizes the concept: “A dream has to be sufficiently stretched…"

"There are great advantages to having everyone sit close together with no walls between them. First of all, teams can talk to each other without having to move around the office, which increases information flow and efficiency. Brito has said he constantly holds one- to five-minute meetings with his key aides, changing topics quickly and making decisions without the need to check schedules and physically move to a meeting room with (often) a host of unnecessary people."

"The corporate world: where meritocracy gets disrupted If, on one hand, our early experiences introduce us to the workings of a meritocracy, in business life things get a bit hazy. It’s at work where we witness bad players playing and great players sitting on the bench, because these bad players are friends with coach; or they date the team’s first daughter; or they’ve been around for so long."

"People chess People chess is what AB Inbev calls its talent management reviews. The logistics are similar to a calibration meeting at other companies: managers sit together in a room to discuss and rate their direct reports. The final output of the meetings is a bit different: a rating, from…"

"Candidates are screened through multiple tests and interviews, after which they meet again, now on a more personalized basis, with top executives, who give their final sign-off on the most promising candidates. This ensures culture fit, and tips the scale towards AB InBev if the candidate has competing offers."

"The idea of a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, according to Collins, is to unite people around a common, greater goal, and also to get them to “stretch” their capabilities—to…"

"Type A Breakdown: Goal-Measure Some goals can be broken down in measures. If goals can’t be broken down in measures, it’s because the goal is an action to be taken. Measures are the components that lead to achieving a goal. For example, in order to achieve higher EBITDA, a company must increase sales, and/or reduce costs, and/or reduce expenses, and/or increase productivity. These are measures. When a goal is broken down in measures, these measures must themselves become someone else’s goals (when they’re added to a time-frame.) So the CEO’s EBITDA goal is broken down to a sales measure, which then becomes the goal of the VP Sales. A goal-goal breakdown is called a Type A breakdown by Vicente Falconi,"

"In March 2004, AmBev and its controlling shareholders announced a complex transaction, in which the trio, via its Braco holding company, merged its controlling stake in AmBev with a number of Belgium-based families’ stakes in Interbrew. As a result, the trio would share control in the combined company, which would itself hold controlling stakes in both AmBev[8] and Interbrew, and be called InBev[9]."

"Falconi, the consultant, also speaks about the obsession for always seeking the “truth” through facts and data-based discussions, where the best argument must always win, despite seniority levels, years with the company, or other subjective factors that are not related to the “truth” of the matter."

"The trainee program was created to develop young talented professionals with an ample, generalist view of the industry and the skills that enable them to undertake key management roles within the company on the short and medium-terms. The recruiting process encompasses seven steps, from the sign-up to on-line quizzes, to a final interview with members of our C-suite. The selected few go through ten months of training. In the first five months, the focus is on acquiring a strategic view of our business, working through manufacturing, sales, and corporate functions. In the second part, they focus on one specific area of the company, after being thoroughly followed by our People Development team[20]."

"3G started out trading in liquid markets and allocating capital in third-party managers via a fund-of-funds. Later on, the firm concentrated its efforts on making large, concentrated investments in publicly traded companies, an asset class commonly known as PIPE (private investment in public equities.)"

"In a recent case of a top performer leaving Burger King, the employee was amazed at how much people tried to dissuade him from leaving once he announced his decision. He had only recently been put into a “Future Promises” list of high potential employees that were expected to take leadership positions within the company in the near future (and didn’t even know it)."

"We basically think that ideal companies are the ones that are publicly traded, but that also have shareholders working for them, because they are surely interested in the really long-term, and in perpetuating the business. I think that’s the ideal balance for a good, long-lasting company. I’ve been myself a part of many an American company’s board of directors where nobody’s got more than 2%, or 3% of the stock. Results were ok, but in general executives start to run the show, and that doesn’t seem healthy, because it generates an environment of excessive stock option issuance, compensation, and attention to quarterly earnings. In sum, my ideal company is not one that lacks a clear owner. I prefer InBev’s current model, where several shareholders take part in the company’s management, ensuring really long-term focus, and also the public shareholders, executives, and employees, who’ve got generous stock purchasing packages."

"Advanced tools The Five Whys and the fishbone graph are basic analysis tools that work for the great majority of the problems faced by companies worldwide. When companies are in a very advanced stage of method adoption, they may need to adopt more sophisticated tools of analysis, like statistical software such as Excel (basic) and MatLab (advanced). These analyses are the responsibility of internal consulting professionals, trained in the ways of Six Sigma (a variation of Total Quality) and graded for their level of expertise like Japanese martial arts practitioners,…"

"Informality is not generally seen as a particularly important characteristic in most large institutions, but it is in ours. Informality is more than just being a first-name company; it’s not just a sense of managers parading around the factory floor in suits, or of reserved parking spaces or other trappings of rank and status. It’s deeper than that. At GE it’s an atmosphere in which anyone can deliver a view, an idea, to anyone else, and it will be listened to and valued, regardless of the seniority of any party involved. Leaders today must be equally comfortable making a sales call or sitting in a boardroom: informality is an operating philosophy as well as a cultural characteristic."

"The deal, completed in June 2013, was significantly larger than the previous ones, but followed the same overall framework: taking a large, U.S.-based, public company private and using large amounts of cheap debt to do so. Heinz shareholders received $ 72.5 per share, or an aggregate amount of $23.3 billion in cash."

"the trio was frustrated with their employees’ lack of commitment to a life of hard work and purpose. This is made evident by the fact that few of Garantia’s partners ever took part at the trio’s other businesses."