--- id: "pisquared:interview/cabral-sandro" type: "Pi-Squared interview" title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Sandro Cabral" url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/cabral-sandro" date: "2024-07-05" people: ["Anita McGahan","Sandro Cabral"] summary: "Sandro Cabral is a full professor of Strategy and Public Management at INSPER in Sao Paolo, Brazil. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Wagner..." recording: "https://vimeo.com/1007829579" source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change" licence: "none stated" --- # Anita McGahan in conversation with Sandro Cabral Sandro Cabral, Professor of Strategy and Public Management at INSPER in Sao Paolo, Brazil · 5 July 2024 ## About the guest Sandro Cabral is a full professor of Strategy and Public Management at INSPER in Sao Paolo, Brazil. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Wagner School at New York University last year, and previously a visiting professor at HEC Paris. Sandro is the author of a forthcoming book that will be published by Palgrave MacMillan called Strategy in Public and NonProfit Organizations. ## Reflections from the interview Sandro make a number of points that stayed on Anita’s mind well after the interview ended.  The first is the suggestion that companies may not really want to innovate in the public interest. They may be more concerned with projecting a portrait of responsibility – whether or not that leads to greenwashing or socialwashing.     A second is that, even for firms that are truly focused on social impact, a barrier is in reconciling the logic of government with that of the private corporation. Private companies are stronger in being flexible, in experimenting. They are better at learning from failure. Public companies are stronger in that they are held to high accountability standards. When these two strengths are in conflict, then its virtually impossible to get anything done. But if they are well aligned, then they can yield powerful innovations. A third is on leadership and trust. Sandro talks about the shortage of leaders around the world.  We need more listening, more trust, more alignment of interests. You get the sense in hearing from Sandro that he wants leaders who can build relationships with insight into the stakes for the importance of the successes that can be achieved once stakeholders get aligned.  He emphasizes dialogue and the co-evolution of understanding. Anita and Sandro talked about their joint project on policing in Brazil. Anita asks Sandro for feedback on how a police chief – a leader in policing – could work with the CEO of a surveillance software company to identify criminality. There are a number of steps that would have to occur to hold the police accountable in implementing software like this safely.  But what about the private-sector?   How can a benevolent, honest CEO deal with the delays and issues that are inevitable in dealing with these delays and issues?   Sandro emphasizes how the two leaders together must find allies and advocates throughout all stakeholder groups, including watchdogs and criminal-advocacy NGOs…  The key, he says, is to find stakeholders with aligned values who are willing to engage in conversations. Once we find friends in all the institutional settings that are relevant, the next step is to experiment, learn, pivot, measure, try, converse, learn some more, and eventually scale.   But the key is to build trust through conversation and mutual deliberation. And we need this in a world in which people don’t want to engage in dialogue. What’s needed is common values across advocates in different types of organizations that can work together to make important things happen. A final and fourth point that Sandro made was very clever:  Anita asked him whether he believes that any capability – whether developed in the public or private sector – can be transferred to the other sector for deployment.   Sandro responded with a resounding ‘yes’ and pointed to the example of the capabilities that Anita had developed while working for the Ontario government as an employee of the University of Toronto that she is now deploying at the Burnes Center, which is part of a private University in a different country.    The point of this discussion for Sandro was to demonstrate that the conveyance of capabilities depends on effective dialog and trust.  For Anita, it also illustrated that, wherever trust makes action possible, the capabilities for accomplishing effective action can be conveyed in. ## Related resources - [Sandro’s Forthcoming Book: *Strategy for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: An Applied Perspective*](https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Public-Nonprofit-Organizations-Perspective/dp/3031649680) - [Co-authored Publication 1](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smj.3571) - [Co-authored Publication 2](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.13478) - [Co-authored Publication 3](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3008) - [Sandro’s Recent Publication: *Can Public Organizations Perform Like Private Firms? The Role of Heterogeneous Resources and Practices*](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2022.1634) ## Recording Video: https://vimeo.com/1007829579 ## Category [Stakeholder](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/stakeholders) * * * Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/cabral-sandro · Licence: none stated