
Decision Leaders. How decision-making experts make a difference
Episode 2 | Interview Ignacio Pugliese & Ernesto Weissmann
In this new episode of Decision Leaders, Ernesto Weissmann, Partner at Tandem, talks with Ignacio Pugliese, President of Asia Region at Bimbo. Throughout this interview, Ignacio shares experiences, learnings, and reflections on decision-making in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, working across diverse cultures, geographies, and roles. His insights invite us to consider how we can make better decisions.


Ernesto Weissmann
Partner at Tandem


Ignacio Pugliese
President of Asia Region at Bimbo
Video transcription
Ernesto Weissmann: Welcome to “Decision Leaders,” a new episode where we talk to experts, professionals who have been making decisions for the past few decades. Today we have a special guest, Ignacio Pugliese.
I’ve known Nacho for several decades, and it’s an honor to have him today. Nacho currently leads all of Asia for Bimbo, the world’s largest Mexican food company. So welcome, Nacho. Thank you for joining us.
Ignacio Pugliese: Hi, hi, hi, how are you? How are you, Ernesto? It’s a pleasure to see you.
Ernesto Weissmann: Thanks. If you want, I’d like you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about who you are and your career. And I’ll ask you my first question right away. It’s a very broad question, but what have you learned about decision-making in companies over all these years of working in so many regions, with such different people, in such different businesses? What can you tell us about what you’ve learned along the way?
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, I’m Nacho Pugliese, I’m 55 years old, I was born in Buenos Aires. I’ve been working at Grupo Bimbo for the last 10 years, and now I’m in charge of the Asia organization. I’m the first one to be in charge of the Asia organization as such. The Group is expanding globally and I’m having a very interesting experience, an adventure, which is to pave the way for the company in this part of the world. I come from working in areas, before I was in charge of the South America region, called “Latin Sur”, Latin South in Bimbo. Before that, I was in charge of sales in Mexico for Bimbo, and before that, I worked 23 years at Unilever with roles as VP of Sales in Mexico. I also had marketing roles, I worked in finance, at my beginnings, and a bit of Supply Chain, so I got to do a bit of everything in these 23 years. And well, I’ve been in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods industry for about 30 years. I really enjoy this business, and I think I’ve spent my entire professional life in this.
Regarding your question, I think decision-making is something you learn with experience and that it has a fundamental analytical part, data, the “hard” stuff, and everything you learn about strategy and experience. And then there’s a “soft” part, which has to do with culture, interpersonal relationships, how you come to make that decision and the process by which you make that decision. So, I think that when you make decisions and you have experiences throughout your career, you have to combine both things. You have a whole part of the library, of the technique, of the hard data, and then there’s a part that has to do with the context, the culture, the team, how you nourish yourself from a team to make good decisions. Because, ultimately, as you grow in a hierarchical structure in a company, you’re supposed to make decisions with greater depth and greater medium-to-long-term impact. So, the decisions you make when they go from being tactical to more medium/long-term or strategic, you decide a lot of the fate of the organization or the business you’re in charge of, and for that it’s important to use all the tools I just mentioned, which if you want we can go into more detail later.
Ernesto Weissmann: Great, thank you. Of course, as you grow within an organization, your level of responsibility increases, and so does the impact of your decisions. I suspect that can be scary too. It must bring a sense of responsibility, pleasure, pride, and at times, it must be difficult, right? I’d be interested to hear what you do in those cases, what you’ve learned, what tools or techniques you’ve used. In other words, what have you acquired as you’ve needed to gain confidence in these increasingly high-impact decisions?
Ignacio Pugliese: Alright, let me see. A few things come to mind… I think one very important thing is to know how to define the problem or the challenge first. Don’t jump to conclusions, and it might sound silly, but I think we often jump into discussions, and when you start to understand what the discussion is with a board or a team, sometimes it turns out that we’re discussing different things or we’re discussing solutions, but we’re not so clear about what the problem or the challenge is.
Then I’ve experienced this a lot, and probably you have too. You have people who need to be 100% certain, and that for me is a problem in companies. Why? Because having 100% certainty about everything, all the elements, and all the data to make a perfect decision is the enemy of the best solution.
There’s also another issue, a third point that I think is worth mentioning. It’s when you look at all of our tests and look at a Myers-Briggs or any other test. We’re all very different, and that happens in politics too, and in life. Some people are more emotional, some are more rational, some are more extroverted, some are more introverted, and so on. You can cut and segment and differentiate. It’s important to know how to have a bit of diversity in the group. Because you can genuinely nourish yourself from that diversity and you can have different points of view on the same topic, from different angles that enrich you a lot. I think it’s important to keep that in mind when you say, “Well, I’m going to open up and explore other options and I’m going to give myself the time to know that there may be other solutions to this challenge or problem”.
And then there’s the issue of experience. I think we should embrace, and not despise experience. It’s something that as you grow in a career, I think today there’s a lot of disruption, a lot of new industries, and it seems like we have to start from scratch because it’s all new. The reality is that it’s not all new and experience is valuable. So, there’s an instinct, an experience, a nose that experience gives you, that you shouldn’t underestimate because it’s very useful and you know where you can stumble, what the problems might be.
Another question is the issue of risk. Measuring risk, knowing how to measure risk is very important. I don’t know, I think so. And finally, I don’t know… maybe one more. It’s after all this process and all these options and opening and closing and experience and everything I just told you, you have to be able to recalculate, if necessary, you have to know that one of these days, suddenly, something clicks. In life, something changes for you overnight, and with all that baggage of information and decision-making and criteria that you can somehow write down somewhere, you may have to recalculate, and you may have to change something or a lot of the decision you’re making. It happens, and that’s part of the equation.
Ernesto Weissmann: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much. It brings up a ton of questions. And you know, this idea you mentioned at the beginning, about clearly defining the problem in complex decisions, decisions that require a heavy process, it has a name. In decision-making it’s called “framing”, and it’s got to do with how you frame, with the perspective from which you’re going to look at the problem.
And of course, if you frame it in the wrong place, you’ll solve very well the wrong problem. You only see what’s inside that frame.
Nacho, you mentioned a series of guidelines that have helped you improve the way you make decisions. How have you done this with your teams? Because I suspect there are decisions you make on your own and others that you make collaboratively with the Board, with people on your own team, or with others who may not report to you, but are part of the organization. What is it like to make decisions with others? How have you helped teams to make better decisions? Group decision-making has different challenges than individual decision-making. What can you tell us about that?
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, what I could have answered 3 years ago when I hadn’t arrived in Asia was one thing, and this has taken on another dimension in a place with a cultural distance, because it’s like the challenge is exponential. The first thing I would tell you before I get to the Asia effect is that throughout your professional life, you start by having 1 or 2 reports, then you start having more people, then you start having Sales, Sales positions or General Management positions, you have hundreds and thousands of people in charge of businesses that are intensive in distribution and production, many plants, many distribution routes. It’s like a super relevant issue because there comes a time when you are you and you do very well in your career because you do things well, you make good directional decisions, you know how to organize yourself with a team of 2, 3, 5, 10 people and you build a team and build a dynamic, a process, certain ethos, certain procedures. You train people, you align them in some way in terms of criteria. They know a bit about the criteria on the guidelines to follow for making decisions and that there is some coherence in how we make decisions in the group. Up to that point, everything is fantastic. The thing is, there are two fundamental variables. One is when you reach a position of Director or VP, that equation no longer works because you don’t do much more, but through others.
So if you were very good, assuming you’re very good and you got to a certain place, what got you there won’t make you successful as a VP in an organization, because there comes a time when you’d have to work 48 hours a day, it’s not possible. So you have to work and lead through others. You have to change and transform yourself into another type of leader who is more inspirational, more focused on training middle management, more focused on leadership by influence, which is a whole new universe that we should prepare for and that we should have good mentors in the stages where one starts to be a manager or director to prepare for that moment where not always one arrives prepared. And one goes building up how to choose people, how to prepare people, how to know how to empower people differently depending on how prepared they are to make decisions with good judgment, and there’s a whole process of one-on-one, group, individual feedback on decision-making criteria, which is fundamental when you start to have a large pyramid of reports in charge.
And if on top of that, you add the abysmal cultural factor that exists between different regions, it’s more complex. I say it that way. Something very silly. Asia is a super vertical culture, I mean super vertical, that is, the boss gives direct lines, not dotted lines, he gives orders, gives instructions, and everyone below is used to following instructions. In China, in India, where I usually work with teams… what I decided from day one that I’m in Asia is: I want to form high-level professional teams in India with Indians and in China, with Chinese. It’s much more difficult at the beginning, but it’s much more powerful. Why? Because I have to be able to navigate the culture and know how to talk to the consumer, to the clients.
So you have to know how to recalculate and build a leadership model where you can’t be so nice and a team player, because people are expecting you to give them an instruction, so you build it, you give them permission to play, you give them permission to empower themselves, and people start to believe and start to grow and start to develop as you give them the reins for that to happen. But it’s not something that’s going to happen right away, and that’s culture.
Ernesto Weissmann: Thanks, this sounds spectacular. You must have learned so much in the different countries where you’ve been and the different regions you’ve led. I’d like to get a little bit into the organizational side, because beyond what you can define for your team, today you have the responsibility to define the structure of an organization, roles, incentives, even shape the culture, change processes. In other words, what are the practices that you’ve seen that work best for a company to make better decisions and then, obviously, do better?
Ignacio Pugliese: I’m going to answer you in an unconventional way, let’s see if it sounds convincing. I like to feel like I own the company, and I have an owner’s mentality. And well, there are books, there is literature that talks about how to form a culture and what is the identity that you give to your teams. Because I work in a company that has a culture, but the reality is that I also put an extra layer of culture on it and put my own stamp on it. And whoever succeeds me will put their own stamp on it. I use the criterion of thinking that it’s our company and that our obsession is to win on the front with the consumer because we’re selling FMCG, consumer goods, fresh products, daily consumption products. I believe that, as long as you can raise your hand and say, “Hold on a minute, our focus is here, that’s our direction”, any discussion we want to have will have this in the center of the table as the focus of our discussion.
That is, how much more quality are we going to give, how much more freshness are we going to give, how much more are we going to surprise the consumer in the best way. So, having those principles, that clear direction, I think helps a lot for that culture and that mentality, even if you’re in Finance, People, Supply Chain, Sales, in general we have to be thinking about how we serve our purpose, our mission. So, if you work here, and we are a group that is trying to fulfill this, this mission, this purpose, this is the game we want to play. And this is very useful to guide because when someone gets lost or distracted, you bring them back and set them in the direction and say, “We’re going that way!”. And many discussions come up and are unblocked this way, even with what may seem like a trivial matter.
Ernesto Weissmann: Nacho, I’d like to ask you, since you’re mentioning it: what is particular about decisions in Consumer Goods, or if you prefer, specifically in the categories that you manage? Because in this cycle we interview people who come from the world of banking, oil and gas… different industries. What particularity do decisions in Consumer Goods have, and more specifically, you said, “a product that is consumed every day”? It supposes a certain dynamic. Can you tell us what those particularities are? What exactly do you see?
Ignacio Pugliese: I think, as you work well internally and organize yourself to be a well-functioning machine in producing quality, service, efficiencies, this allows you to offer that Winning Equation at all points of sale, every day, in all geographies. Consumer Goods has to converge on those Moments of Truth, and you have to win or lose. Hopefully win every day, but sometimes you have to deal with a service issue, or you arrive late. So, I think there is a chain of factors that have to occur for you to do well and fulfill your function in Consumer Goods, because, ultimately, you are meeting daily needs. If you put out bread, bread is a daily consumption product.
Then, we sell snacks that are more occasional consumption. A snack is something that is consumed maybe not every day, on different consumption occasions. But a bit of the stress for someone new to Consumer Goods is you’re playing every day, doing things better or worse than the day before, and many, many thousands of Moments of Truth that occur in consumers, in homes, in moments of consumption, where you compete with a lot of other options. The reality is that I sell bread, but I don’t just compete with bread, I compete with a lot of categories and alternative consumption moments that every consumer has. So, if I see my business is this and my challenge is this, I’m defining the size of my business and my opportunity in a very limited way, because if I see the business broadly, by consumption occasions, breakfast, dinner, lunch, snack, they are infinite.
Ernesto Weissmann: That’s fantastic. Let me fast forward a bit. All industries today are being transformed by technology in general, and in particular, the world of decision-making by Artificial Intelligence in some form. How do you think your industry, and specifically the industry’s decisions, will change in the coming years?
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, the first thing I would say is that I’m surprised by what’s already happening and that I’m practicing with it. That is, I have an internal company AI tool where all documents, emails, all the information we generate comes in. And it’s impressive because, of course, I like to explore, I love playing with technology and it’s giving me very interesting insights and mixing, bringing me inputs for decision-making in many cases. I think it hasn’t yet reached a good level in everything that is numerical, at least in my case, for some reason I still don’t get to everything that has to do with crossing numbers and getting insights from the numerical. I think that’s going to be enhanced, I mean, it seems like a science fiction movie, but I think our generation and the one to come will see a revolution in the quality of insights and information with which we can make decisions. You’re still going to have uncertainty, I think.
That is, it’s one thing how you process all the historical part and how you make an optimized decision. I think there’s a part that is the uncertainty of the future, or the scenarios that you can simulate, but that remain uncertain. And you have like two lanes in the business world, at least. There is a business lane: the competition, the industries, the consumption, Nielsen, Kantar, you name it. All that, which you can put in a blender and get a lot of insights and projections. Then, there are a lot of things that just happen: COVID, wars, politics, tariffs that suddenly fall from the sky and I don’t know what AI can predict some of those things that have happened to us in the last 30 years that I’ve worked in consumption. I find it hard to understand that there is an AI that can anticipate that, but for everything else it’s an excellent opportunity to consolidate, strengthen, work on scenarios, simulations, a lot of things that are super interesting and that will probably give us very good results in much less time and perhaps with less effort and fewer people required, because ultimately, you will be able to have a computing capacity and a thinking capacity and a learning curve about an industry, about a geography, about decision-making that I think will help because it is already helping… and a lot.
Ernesto Weissmann: I’d love to learn a bit more about your story. As you mentioned earlier, you have a specific profile. And everyone has their own. And that profile makes you more or less extroverted, more or less risk-taking or risk-averse, more likely to make decisions with 70% of the information… without having to wait for 100%, etc. Where does that come from? What can you find in your history that has defined the way you make decisions today?
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, the first thing I’ll tell you is I’m not extroverted. I used to be very shy as a kid, and I worked in roles that pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me. Imagine, I was very shy, and at some point, I ended up in front of a sales convention with hundreds of people, having to speak in front of them, which would have been panic at first. Over time, I learned, and I broke my limitations and grew. So, that makes me feel very proud because I think I reinvented myself and learned to evolve. I think it’s been an obsession in my life to say, “I want to feel the wind in my face, I want to feel like I’m evolving”. I would say that since I was very young, coming from a family of 8 siblings, I had a grandfather who would take me for walks every day and we would go out looking for adventures, experiences, take a train and go all the way to Retiro from Belgrano. Truth is we did all kinds of… and he was someone who influenced me a lot in terms of exploring, learning, knowing. I’m someone who likes to listen to podcasts, I listen to music, I’ve been traveling, since I could save up $4 pesos, I travel and learn. Today’s work experience, I think, aligns very well with what my personal mission is, that is, I really like to step out of my comfort zone, which is not common in many people, And I enjoy it, and well, I’ve been living outside of Argentina for 17 years in different experiences, different companies, different roles. I think it’s always been in my nature, so it’s something I’d say I wouldn’t be able to force. I have that hunger to grow, to learn, to explore, and I think I bring it in my essence, so I don’t know if I’ve rationalized it very well for your question.
Ernesto Weissmann: It’s great. No, no, but you touched on a lot of points, some from a very early childhood and others more linked to the barriers you’ve overcome and your own learnings. That is, it’s not like personality is strictly determined from a young age, but it’s also forged. That’s great.
Nacho, the last question, we’ve been talking for a good while. You have more than 30 years of experience, you’ve made decisions regarding a thousand functional areas, well maybe not a thousand, but many functional areas in multiple geographies. If you had to give advice to someone, to a young person who is going to face a world with more data, more processing, more complexity, more possibilities, more uncertainty, even though there are more tools to predict… Where would you focus? What advice would you give to someone who is starting their work life or who’s just been appointed a manager so that they can do their best?
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, as things that come to mind for your question, I’d say… First, write your own constitution. That is, define who you want to be and who you don’t want to be. You can start doing it very roughly in what I want to be and what I don’t want to be. Look for references, look at people who have more flight hours than you and define a bit what kind of person and professional you want to be and what kind of professional and person you don’t want to be. And well, I think this is a document you can review once a month, once a quarter. You don’t have to obsess about having a finished product on day one, but it’s good that over the years… I’ve talked to several people who I’ve mentored, I say, “Try to write down, in black and white, on a sheet of paper or on the iPad, in two columns, the dos and don’ts.”. That for me is something important I wasn’t told, but for me it’s something intuitively important to know who you are and what things interest you, and what things don’t interest you. And then the other thing is to go on a cultural safari, have many colors in your head, that is, build, open your head a lot, explore, and today you can explore from your home. If you can’t travel, on the Internet you have any number of things, from YouTube, networks, you have courses of all colors for free. I think it’s super interesting to learn seemingly unrelated things that at some point start to amalgamate into something interesting, even for life, right?
And then, I think that as long as you don’t find that sense with that first piece of paper, if you don’t find that sense, keep looking because as long as you’re tied and enslaved to a salary and something that doesn’t excite you, I’m not saying that everything will always excite you and that your boss will always be super likeable. So, I think you have to try to find your own path. I think opportunities always appear; opportunities always appear within a company. One can always be an entrepreneur, or what they now call an “intrapreneur”.
Ernesto Weissmann: Spectacular. Nacho, thank you so much. Truly, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you, and to delve so deeply into all these topics.
Ignacio Pugliese: Well, thank you very much, and a big hug. It was a pleasure seeing you, Ernesto… until next time.
Ernesto Weissmann: Thank you, Nacho. I invite you all to stay connected, to participate in the upcoming interviews of the Decision Leaders cycle, that we will be publishing with great pleasure. Thank you and until next time.