Oriol Bonaclocha, President of Mondelez México, and Osmar Zavaleta, Interim Dean of EGADE Business School, discuss the keys to recovery in an EGADE Future Forum series webinar.

By INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION | EGADE BUSINESS SCHOOL

The capacity of organizations to adapt, innovate, and capitalize on the changes produced by the COVID-19 pandemic is key to business transformation in the new reality. 

These were the words of Oriol Bonaclocha, President of Mondelez México, during an EGADE Future Forum series webinar, moderated by Osmar Zavaleta, Interim Dean of EGADE Business School.

In the session “Business reinvention in a challenging environment. Keys for recovery,” the executive explained that the multinational leader in snacks needed to change its business operations and leadership styles in order to reinvent itself as a company.

“(In our operations) we had to change and accelerate. Some of our processes went from being annual, quarterly or monthly to weekly,” he said.

For example, The State of Snacking report, published by Mondelez every year, required weekly updates during the first 20 weeks of the pandemic in order to understand the changes in consumers’ behavior and buying trends.

“We had to be far more agile,” he stated.

In addition, he stated, the company was able to adapt to working in remote teams, thereby assuring business continuity in the most challenging circumstances experienced in the past few years.

“This implies learning how to trust employees to work remotely,” he said.

Referring to the reflections of author Keith Ferrazzi, Bonaclocha commented that, during the last few months of working remotely, he has learned that physical distance has nothing to do with the success of a team.

What makes remote teams win is being able to shrink strategic and affinity distance.

“If we manage to develop our agility muscle in order to change and, at the same time, include the affinity pillar that aligns all our actions, then we will be ready for the future,” Bonaclocha said.

Watch the complete webinar here.

With information from Valentina Flores Cáceres