Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management

“Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management” analyzes Latin American militias as organizations, highlighting the elements that best fit people who see themselves as members of groups—a description that fits the vast majority of the world. Among militias, loyalty largely overrides merit and can align a people into highly effective action, a characteristic that business organizations wish to promote.

Most subsidiaries of multinational organizations in developing countries are managed like modern-day saladeros, beef-jerking companies where, in the process of salting beef, workers salted themselves out of life. In Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management Alfredo Behrens illustrates the Latin American organizational how-to through a dialogue attributed to two iconic literary characters, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. Fierro—passionate, nonpragmatic, xenophobic—and Sombra—with a more nuanced affection toward old ways—comment on the militia-led insurrections from Argentina and Uruguay through Brazil, Venezuela, Central America and Mexico, and draw lessons about leadership, strategy and people management in Latin America and the United States. While the book’s argument covers the ethos prevailing in the Americas, Behrens believes it may be relevant elsewhere among similar societies where people prefer to act as members of clans than as autonomous individuals. If so, the book’s argument may be relevant for the vast majority of humankind at work.