I spent years on both sides of the table. That's where I understood the problem.
I started at Falconi, Brazil's leading management consultancy, building analyses and cascading targets for large companies. I saw management from the outside, on paper.
Then I crossed the table. As Regional Director at a gas distribution company, I took on a P&L of around one billion reais, seven hundred people, reporting directly to the CEO. There, I no longer prepared the report on the result. I was responsible for producing it.
And it was in the first results meeting I had to run as an executive, not as a consultant, that it clicked. There's an enormous distance between presenting the number that already happened and going into the field to change the number while there's still time. Most companies live on the first side of that distance. And it isn't incompetence. It's the model we were all taught to follow.
I watched the same pattern repeat for over twenty years.
Pharma, banking, steel, retail, logistics, energy, pulp and paper, education, healthcare, aviation, the public sector. Family-owned, professionally managed, publicly listed. In more than twenty years inside the management of companies across virtually every sector of the real economy, I saw the same signature appear, regardless of size, sector or culture.
Companies measure the financial result rigorously, the scoreboard, and leave unmanaged the chain that produces that result: the cause, the process, the execution along the way. They hold teams accountable for a number they don't control, and leave in the dark the one place the result could still change.
I call it scoreboard management. It isn't one company's bad luck. It's a pattern. And a pattern has a cause.
Anyone can diagnose the past.
It's easy to become an expert afterward. After the market stalled, the crisis passed, the company closed. The world is full of brilliant analyses of what already happened.
My work is different. I come in while there's still room to act, I make the strategic provocation that hurts enough to move people in the present, and I aim to deliver a quick result early on, because that's how you prove, in practice, that it could be changed.
Where I work, I have to pay for myself. Quickly.
How I work.
I don't bring an outside model to install on top of what the company already has. I start with what it already measures, the dashboard, the targets book, the initiative portfolio, and I show, with numbers, where the declared strategy doesn't appear in the measurement.
I have the background, but I don't hide behind frameworks. I respect each company's culture and leadership, and I know how to provoke without offending, move without intruding, influence without embarrassing. I get my hands dirty, I share what I know, the tools, the network. My network becomes yours.
I don't chase hype. I stay open to what's new, but I test small and fast before believing it. I'm not the stage innovator, not a coach, and I don't say what the client wants to hear. I say what needs to be said, with respect, timing and precision.
What drives me.
Strategy only matters when it becomes results, and results only change while the game is still being played. I've spent my career learning to see where it's being lost, in the middle of the path, far from the scoreboard. That's what I do: I bring management back to the point where it still changes something.
Átila Persici has spent the last twenty years between management consulting and executive leadership. Today he diagnoses the gap between the strategy companies declare and what they actually measure. Columnist at HSM Management.