“A key takeaway from the program was the fact that it put me in contact with wider group of International people, both students but also faculty members and industry specialists”.

Overall, I would describe the net effect as positive. Especially during my time with Accenture, I had the privilege of working in more than 20 countries. Such international experience, apart from exposing the person to a wider range of industries, connections and environments, creates an ideal platform for “practicing management”.

Working with people in an effective way is a matter of practice; and for this one need to get to know them, their environment and the way they think. A diverse background also teaches the person new things about themselves: On what they like more and what they want to become.

However, there is a matter of trade-off here and it goes without saying that selecting such a path impacts the person’s personal life.

It seems like ZLOG program was an inspiration, a springboard for you to fine-tune your ideas, resulting in your subsequent published materials. Am I right?

I think a key takeaway from the program was the fact that it put me in contact with wider group of International people, both students but also faculty members and industry specialists.

In interacting with others, you identify areas of mutual interest and learn from each other or take new initiatives. In my case, some of relations have been extremely fruitful in terms of publishing new thought leadership. An example is the work I did with Dr. Oswaldo Lorenzo of IE Business School (now with Deusto Business School) on the impact of collaborative approaches in decision making on the final business outcomes.

Considering all your works and activities so far, what has been your biggest challenge to date, and did this turn out the work you are most proud of?

Throughout the years I’ve had to deal with many challenges of different kind. Career wise, the recent move to establish “Ennomotive” has been a challenging task as I moved from a relatively certain to an uncertain position. The difficult part is less about creating an entity which generates superior financial return but more about whether we can create something which has an impact in the world or hopefully leaving a legacy.

I’m very proud of what our team has done so far in terms of turning an idea into something tangible, but we always try to remind ourselves that success in terms of achieving certain goals is not an entitlement but it’s something that we have to prove to ourselves and other every day. This continues to be one of the big challenges for me and the rest of the team.

It’s great that you brought up Ennomotive. With your global profile and experience in operations strategy, you didn’t stop. Currently you are the co-founder of Ennomotive, a platform for solving operations problems through crowdsourcing and tournaments. When did you see that particular gap in the market and how do you hope to fill it?

Our original team of 5 people all came from a management consulting background with global firms. During the last 5 years, we have witnessed a number of changes in the industry which finally motivated us to do something about it. As a summary:

1) The existing model for management consulting is relatively expensive: Typically companies with less than $100 million in revenues can’t afford it and the larger firms are either establishing their own in-house teams or putting pressure on the costs.

2) Clients are moving towards value-based models and pay for a solution which solves their problems rather than recommendations.

3) Even for global firms, it’s extremely difficult to have relevant knowledge on all the issues in-house. Add to that, the bulk of the workforce which is relatively young without decades of experience or tacit knowledge in a certain sector.

Developing a community of thinkers, experts and specialized partners is an alternative to address such issues as it is cheaper, value-based and faster. We have developed several partnerships with research institutions and professional associations in addition to absorbing solvers but a lot remains to be done. You can check out more about our work here: http://www.ennomotive.com