---
id: "pisquared:interview/vassolo-roberto"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Roberto Vassolo"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/vassolo-roberto"
date: "2026-08-24"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Roberto Vassolo"]
summary: "Roberto Vassolo is a tenured professor in Business Policy at IAE Business School-Universidad Austral. He holds a PhD in Strategic Management from Purdue..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1222560988"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Roberto Vassolo

Roberto Vassolo, Professor in Business Policy, IAE Business School-Universidad Austral · 24 August 2026

## About the guest

Roberto Vassolo is a tenured professor in Business Policy at IAE Business School-Universidad Austral. He holds a PhD in Strategic Management from Purdue University, a postgraduate degree in Economics from Universidad Di Tella, and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Universidad Católica Argentina. Roberto directs the Strategic Leadership program and served as director of the Doctoral program between 2015 and 2025. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the research journal Long-Range Planning. Roberto’s research deals with strategy in highly uncertain environments, with a focus on the impact of macroeconomic volatility on businesses. He is also interested in strategic leadership. His papers have been published in a wide range of our top journals, and he is also the author of a number of important books for students and practitioners, including Strategy as Leadership (Stanford University Press), Strategic Management in Emerging Countries (Granica), and The Business of the Divide (Galerna).

## Reflections from the interview

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.

## Related resources

- [Roberto’s scholarly website](https://www.robertovassolo.com/)
- [Roberto’s IAE website](https://www.iae.edu.ar/profesores/roberto-santiago-vassolo/)
- [Google scholar on Roberto](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rHfZpekAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao)
- [Roberto’s 2004 paper on real options in biotechnology](https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smj.414)
- [Roberto’s recent Proceedings paper on Timing Growth](https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMPROC.2025.19120abstract)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1222560988

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/vassolo-roberto · Licence: none stated