--- id: "pisquared:interview/sergio-lazzarin" type: "Pi-Squared interview" title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Sergio Lazzarini" url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/sergio-lazzarin" date: "2024-07-12" people: ["Anita McGahan","Sergio Lazzarini"] summary: "Sergio Lazzarini is Chafi Haddad Professor of Management at Insper in Brazil, and one of my closest friends and collaborators. He studies the strategy and..." recording: "https://vimeo.com/1007828761" source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change" licence: "none stated" --- # Anita McGahan in conversation with Sergio Lazzarini Sergio Lazzarini, Chafi Haddad Professor of Management at INSPER in Sao Paolo, Brazil · 12 July 2024 ## About the guest Sergio Lazzarini is Chafi Haddad Professor of Management at Insper in Brazil, and one of my closest friends and collaborators. He studies the strategy and governance of organizations pursuing social impact, which encompass diverse actors such as impact-oriented private enterprises, public (state-owned) organizations, and public-private collaborations. ## Reflections from the interview Sergio and I start out by talking together abut his work on issues of justice.   Sergio explains that, in the CSR and ESG movements, people often forget why we do what we do.  He talks about how firms ultimately must face tradeoffs that are financial.   He suggests that you don’t have a guidepost on how to make those tradeoffs without a justice benchmark.   This could be, for instance, a minimum level of protection that must be provided.  He asks me to think about a great paper by our friends, Assem Kaul and Jiao Luo, which shows that oil companies that suffer spills subsequently offer more to charity.  The problem, they ask, is:  But what about the environment?!   You have to conduct yourself at a minimum level of responsibility that is categorical to act justly. Anita remarks that this is a very practical way of thinking about theory.  This is not about abstract moralization; rather, it’s about how to act in particular situations.   Sergio co-founded an organization called INSPER Metricis (with Professor Leo Pongeluppe) that is designed to support companies in understanding how to have impact.  The initial focus of INSPER Metricis was on doing things that could be A-B tested through controlled experiments.   But now, INSPER Metricis is moving toward supporting better theorizing through consulting with communities.  He gives an example of microcredit firms that extend loans to small businesses, and the unexpected finding documented by yet another former student, Professor Leandro Nardi of HEC Paris, that the companies that got the credit actually perform worse than the ones that didn’t.  Why!?   It’s because they lacked basic financial skills.  In the same way, a group of computing entrepreneurs wanted to give computers to children in a Rio favela to improve their education.  But this didn’t work because of the absence of electricity and of Internet service.   You need a good theory of what people need, he says. And he emphasizes that the only way to do this is through talking with the community.   You must have a compass oriented by justice and take that compass into conversations with those you seek to serve.   Sergio and his students keep trying to go one step further to climb the mountain behind the mountain.   We then turned to Sergio’s studies on education, and he mentioned the scholarship of Professor Joe Mahoney of the University of Illinois.  Our friend Joe has been studying the dangers of privatization of prisons.   Sergio and I wrestled with the analogy to schools:   Public schools often yield worse performance than private schools on educational outcomes, which stands in contrast to Joe’s work on prisons.   We talked about the results of a study that Sergio has done showing that there can be learning and transfer of capabilities across the private-public boundary, such as when public schools learn about straightforward practices that they can readily adopt that improve outcomes:   planning, performance monitoring, tracking absences, sending messages to families, and so on.   These are simple things that the public school can adopt by learning from private schools.   And of course learning can go in the other direction as well, as public schools perform better on providing access to education for all. Anita asks Sergio what makes it so hard for public schools and other public actors to adopt these simple practices.  Why does learning have to take place?   Sergio then reflects on how government really works in practice.  He talks about political appointments at the detriment of advocates of education.   And he contrasts them with the successes of the Ministry of Education in the northeastern province of Sobral in Brazil, where a culture of educational excellence spread through the Schools through inspired and skilled leadership.  The net of it all is that there are different ways to get to excellence, but that all require deep engagement with the problems and community consultation to get there. Anita concludes by asking Sergio what he’s most excited about on these topics.   His answer:  Community-based theorization.  Sergio says that often people in companies want to help, but they don’t know how to start, or how to identify alternatives, or how to move forward.  They can become overwhelmed by the prospect of designing projects.   He emphasizes that the place to begin is in dialogue:  You have to talk!   You have to understand what the community really wants.  And then you test that in a pilot study with experimental testing…     And you learn, and you find the mountain behind the mountain, and you go after that.   Sergio is even thinking about creating a school where these kinds of conversations can occur. Big thanks to Professor Sergio for his inspiring innovations in this critical domain, and for his insights and compassion for social impact. ## Related resources - [Sergio’s Website](https://sites.google.com/view/sergio-lazzarini/home) - [Sergio’s Book: *The Right Way to Privatization*](https://www.amazon.com/Right-Privatization-Private-Initiatives-Governments/dp/1316519716/) - [Sergio’s Paper on Human-Capital Development (with Sandro Cabral and Thomaz Teodorovicz)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smj.3571) - [Sergio’s Paper on Public-Private Collaboration (with Anita, Gerry George, Thomas Fewer, and Phanish Puranam)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01492063221148992) - [Sergio’s Sole-Authored Working Paper on Corporate Morality](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4233348) ## Recording Video: https://vimeo.com/1007828761 ## Category [Excellence](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/excellence) * * * Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/sergio-lazzarin · Licence: none stated