Professor in Business Policy, IAE Business School-Universidad Austral
In this episode, host Anita McGahan sits down with Roberto Vassolo, tenured professor of business policy at IAE Business School in Buenos Aires, director of its Strategic Leadership Program, and co-editor-in-chief of Long Range Planning. Vassolo traces his research on strategy under extreme uncertainty back to his origins on his father's farm in Argentina — a country he describes as having endured the world's highest inflation and most frequent recessions over the past century — and to the practical question that has driven him ever since: how do you actually run a business in an environment like that? He describes arriving at Purdue to work with Arnie Cooper and Ken Miller, finding his way into real options, and later growing dissatisfied with the static frameworks he was teaching once he returned home and began consulting. That discomfort pushed him toward Schumpeter, Nelson and Winter, and Klepper, whose evolutionary approach gave him something he argues the Five Forces snapshot cannot: a way to identify what is predictable in a volatile environment, including the gaps in existing models when it comes to commodity industries, which account for a large share of world trade. The conversation then turns to implementation, where Roberto argues that strategic priorities fail not because managers pick the wrong ones but because priorities impose real direct losses on groups inside the organization. The sales team built for double-digit growth is not the team you need in maturity. He closes on what sustains him: an admittedly romantic passion for research, a commitment to building management scholarship in Argentina because better research means better companies, and the support of his wife and collaborator Natalia.
Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business, Columbia University
Associate Professor of Strategic Management, National University of Singapore
Harold Quinton Chair Emeritus, University of Southern California
Assistant Professor, INSEAD