Business in Brazil, Wharton edition

Next month I will take a group of 40 Wharton MBAs to Brazil for an intensive week of experiential learning. Here's why it is a highlight of my year.

Twenty years ago I went to Brazil for the first time. I have loved the country ever since. Next month, I will for the second time take a group of 40 Wharton MBAs to São Paulo for an intensive weeklong course, called in the Wharton vernacular a Global Modular Course (GMC). Here’s why this is one of my favorite things I do at Wharton.

The contradictions of Brazil

The first reason is Brazil itself. There are few countries in the world that capture the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of modernity more than Brazil. It is hardwired into so much of the standard narratives about Brazil, inside and outside the country. The standard joke is that Brazil is the land of the future…and always will be. There is of course a great deal of pain in that expression. It feels almost cosmically unjust to encounter a land of such bounty, stymied by institutions that have prevented it from achieving economic escape velocity. There are deep structures of inequality in Brazilian history, problems with political and economic stability, a sense of looming doom and the longed-for need for a sudden, miraculous change in circumstances. (Watch Brazilians watch their national fútbol team and you will see prayers for that change on nearly everyone’s lips.)

O jeitinho brasileiro

One of my favorite expressions in Portuguese—which I speak fluently, both from a Latter-day Saint mission to Portugal and because I majored in Romance Literatures in college, focusing on Portuguese and French—is dar um jeitinho, literally “to give a little way” but sometimes styled as “making do.” But this misses the meaning. At its best, it means to think outside the box to solve a hard problem. At its worst, it means violating the rules you don’t like to gain an advantage.

The study of Brazilian business is in some important respects the study of the jeitinho, in its best and worst senses. The entrepreneurs, executives, and policymakers we will meet have seen it all. We will learn about Lava Jato, the epic corruption scandal that brought down one Brazilian president and has reverberated through Brazilian politics ever since. (I recommend this great book, The Mechanism, as an overview.) We will hear about Pix, the extraordinary public payments infrastructure that has broken nearly every global record of adoption but which may have serious defects of security, cyber and physical, and poses important questions about the sustainability of innovation in the public and private sectors. We will see incredible success stories of Brazilian ingenuity, but also hear the heartbreak of a country that suffers a major economic disaster with startling frequency.

We will also appreciate better why Brazil is and remains such an incredible leader in cultural development from across the arts. Antonio Jobim, the great pianist and songwriter who led the way in inventing bossa nova will feature prominently. (I am going to assign the record Elis & Tom to my students, one of my favorite albums of all time.)

The purpose of a Global Modular Course

For my students—or potential students—who follow this newsletter, let me make the pitch why we do this at Wharton. It is among the most intensive, and most exciting, opportunities we give to Wharton students. We spend this week in tightly booked meetings but growing an esprit de corps that, by the end, is surprisingly poignant and emotional. We eat our meals together, travel together, and spend almost all of our waking hours together, processing the experience together, faculty and students alike. I am assisted by our extraordinary faculty support in this effort (led by the inimitable Ziv Katalan, a man with superhuman and encyclopedic knowledge of any city over 1 million people anywhere in the world) and by two teaching assistants who have become like family to me, Paula Takahishi Benitez and Rodrigo Trotta Yaryd, both native Brazilians and current Wharton students. It is experiential learning at its finest.

The power of experiential learning

My personal engagement with Brazil is an illustration of why this kind of direct exposure is so important. Before going to Brazil, I had read much of its literature, been a daily reader of its newspapers, and considered myself something of an expert. In the summer of 2004, I received enough funding to explore the entire country as part of a research project on Brazilian emigration to the United States. I focused on Governador Valadares, a city in the state Minas Gerais famous for its chain migration to the Boston area. I walked the beaches of Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro, explored the vastness of the city of São Paulo, the German-inflected experiences of Curitiba in the south, and took the Serra Verde express train, a three-hour journey through the Atlantic rainforest. I also spent an enormous amount of time in Brasilia, the nation’s capital since 1960.

And I barely scratched the surface.

In our GMC, we focus in a very narrow set of city blocks in one city, São Paulo, and are exposed to a tiny slice of Brazilian society. That slice, meager though it may be, is worth more than a lot of the reading we could assign in a comparable course in Philadelphia.

I’ll report back next month after the course is done. But if it is anything like the one I did two years ago, it will be a course that changes us, students and faculty both.

I can’t wait.