Brazilian Strategy Does Not Live in a Chair

There is a strategic decision sitting still right now in the head of some business owner in Brazil. Stalled for months. He calls it prudence. The 2029 balance sheet will call it something else.

I thought about this reading the CSO Brazil report, from STRATEGA.GLOBAL Brazil, coordinated by Tiago Grandi: more than a hundred strategists from the country's largest companies, heard one by one. It is the best portrait of the Brazilian strategist ever made. And it is precisely because it is the best that its blind spot matters.

The study interviewed those who have a chair. People with the word strategy in their title. But in the overwhelming majority of Brazilian companies that chair does not exist, and where it does not exist strategy does not disappear. It rises. It goes to live in the owner's head, squeezed between today's urgency and tomorrow's, decided in the hallway, between one fire and the next. The study itself touches this in a single line, when it admits that, without a CSO, the function falls to the Board and to active advisors. One line. That line is Brazil.

I did not read this. I lived it. I was that strategist without a chair. Inside an operation of ten thousand cars a month, half the group's retail, I was the one playing the role the study describes: reading the scenario, connecting the areas, sustaining the long-term decision while everyone else put out the fire of the day. Without the title, without the area, without recognition of the function. Then I moved into energy and found the same architecture: someone always carries that role, and the company almost never knows who to name. The study confirms what I felt firsthand: the role exists in every organization that survives. What does not exist, in the vast majority of them, is the recognition that it is a function, and not an accident.

And it was performing that role that I learned to tell apart the two things every diagnosis confuses. The Brazilian business owner does not have an adaptation problem. He is the most versatile operator on the planet: he survives currency swings, interest rates, blackouts, reforms. His problem is another one. The operational decision he makes in minutes; the structural one, he postpones for years. And postponement has a cruel property: it appears in no report. There is no line on the balance sheet called the decision I did not make. There is only the symptom, three years later: the company that earned more and profited less. Revenue growth hiding an error being scaled.

A postponed decision is not prudence. It is accumulated cost.

In energy, that cost does not even wait for the balance sheet. Postponing the bet on infrastructure, on storage, on position, does not erode margin; it erodes relevance. The window closes and the cycle decides for you. A maturing market does not reward the one who adapted. It rewards the one who chose first.

The study ends optimistic: companies will build their areas, the career will take shape. For the large ones, perhaps. But that is the answer of those who already know they need strategy, and the Brazilian deficit is one floor above, in the owner who has no chair, does not miss it, and accumulates cost in silence. For that owner, the strategist who is missing will not come from the org chart. He already exists: he is the Board Member, the advisor, the outside mind who comes in when the fire grows too big for improvisation. I know because I held that place from inside before holding it from outside. The study mapped the strategist with a badge. The country bleeds on the decision that never had any chair at all.

The question, therefore, is not whether Brazil will train strategists. It is whether those who already decide will stop confusing postponing with thinking.

Because strategy was never a job title. It is the price you accept paying to decide before the comfortable hour.

Be comfortable in discomfort.