Endorsement by prestigious readers I am very grateful to:
“Highly engaging, exciting and thought provoking…Professor Alfredo’s mode of inquiry is unique and the style of presentation has a rhythmic flow... The distilled wisdom derived from the study of great heroes of South America has many pertinent lessons for corporate leaders. I highly recommend this book to corporate leaders, educators and scholars”
Dr P. Singh, Professor of Eminence,
MDI-Gurgaon, India.
“Professor Behrens has collected a series of excellent lessons from Latin American leaders and presented them in an engaging dialogue style. The insights he develops will be applicable to those interested in leadership across the globe. Whether you’re interested in the leadership legacy of Latin America or leadership in general, Shooting Heroes will deepen your leadership understanding.”
James Clawson, Johnson & Higgins Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, The Darden School, University of Virginia.
"Shooting Heroes is more than an important Latin American book; it is a refreshing take on leadership that will be relevant across the globe. Behrens's authentic dialogue carries the reader through the rich legacy of the Latino gauchos, a legacy ripe with lessons that any modern manager will want to put to use immediately."
Suzy Welch Former Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review and Co-author of “Winning”, with Jack Welch.
“Shooting Heroes is a remarkable book that shows the influence of culture in shaping people´s attitudes to leadership and ethics in management. In telling this through a story, Professor Behrens has turned a scholarly subject into one which will echo in the minds of business leaders and managers.”
Professor Consuelo Adelaida García De la Torre
Egade, Monterrey, Mexico
In this book I call foreign subsidiaries in Latin America by the name of saladeros.
"At saladeros people are sapped of their energy, of their will, of their desire to become; there, all creativity is beaten off them until mediocrity is installed through conformity. This is why I have called such places saladeros, places where people jerked beef while they unwittingly salted themselves out of life in the process. The preserving technology may have changed, but the slow kill process has not."
This is a story on Latin American autochthonous leadership and management told through two gaucho protagonists, Martin Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. The story is grounded on real 19th century popular revolts across Latin America because they allow drawing lessons on how people were led and managed effectively before American Scientific Management took over business schools and practice there.
The core purpose of the book lies in showing how the culture of the people of this region of the World shapes their expectations as to how they wish to be treated at work. The need for a better tuning of leadership and management theory and practice to the people is signalled by the increasing amounts of grassroot political leaders that have sprung up in the region in the last decade: Brazil´s Lula, Venezuela´s Chavez, Bolivia´s Evo Morales, Peru´s Umala, Paraguay´s Lugo, Uruguay´s Mujica and others. In voting for unfashionable political leaders the people are also telling us they do not like being managed like if they were foreigners in their own land.
The increased pressure for more culture-friendly management techniques and more appropriate leadership styles is the likely shade of the next stage of the expanding politician and business change wave.
The book reveals effective leadership and organizational traits which have been long neglected by North and South American business schools. It informs in an enticing manner, through a dialogue between the two gauchos while riding on horseback from the Southern Pampas to Northern Mexico.
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