From journalism, Barbara Soalheiro moved to entrepreneurship and she created a method that approaches work in a revolutionary way. For 13 years, MESA has been used by organizations and professionals around the world to access complex solutions to business challenges, in only 5 days.
Barbara remembers her first encounter with Unfinished Festival, where she will be present again this year.
„When I came for the first time, in 2019, I crashed a wedding with Esther Perel, Kitra Cahana, Luca Zamoc and a few other amazing humans. It’s the kind of experience that connects people for life – and it for sure connected me with Unfinished for life”, says Barbara.
Barbara Soalheiro, creator of MESA, will speak at Unfinished about how we work. Barbara is passionate about working following the best combination: pleasure + results. She has worked with well-known organizations (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Coca-Cola) and famous professionals (Kobe Bryant, Cindy Gallop, Perry Chen, Fernando Meirelles).
This year's edition theme is #Praxis, and this year Unfinished Festival is about connecting theory with practice, about how we can transform ourselves from information’s passive receivers to active creators of our own way of learning.
Professional journey
I’m a journalist from Minas Gerais, an inland Brazilian state.
I’ve always loved learning and always loved writing and those two interests led me to journalism.
It was definitely the practice that shaped my understanding of work as something you do to serve your community, my understanding of what is truth and what are facts and my responsibility towards information.
Memorable moments in your career as a journalist
Coming out of a meeting with Kim St Clair, who leads Hearst Magazine International and was responsible for the brand licensing to the Brazilian market a few months after I had become editor-in-chief of Capricho, Brazilian biggest teen brand at the time. I had flown to NYC with Giuliana Tatini, my partner at Capricho, and Kim was generous enough to hold a 2 hour meeting where she told us everything that was wrong with the magazine we were doing. Giu and I came out of that meeting completely dizzy. We literally had to lay down to recover. It changed Capricho and it changed me forever.
The path towards entrepreneurship
My parents are entrepreneurs and I think deep down I always felt like I should have my own thing.
The first step was not accepting any job offers. When I went back to Brazil after 2 years working in Italy, I went back with a job. I stayed for 3 months at this position because I knew if I stayed longer, I wouldn’t launch this thing – now known as MESA – that I really wanted to do. I forced myself to be out of a job and kept doing some freelance work to get some money but all of a sudden I had to make MESA happen because I didn’t have that “I have a job” excuse anymore.
How you come up with the idea of MESA
If trace it back to the genesis, it was when I was invited to go to Fabrica and Sergio – my then boyfriend, now my husband – thought what many people think when their partner is invited to work abroad: “I’ll take the opportunity to study something”. And as we researched courses for him to do in Europe it became clear that dropping his work at the time – he was an editor for a great magazine – to sit down in a classroom, to hear people talk about perfect examples or hypothetical situations, made no sense. We both felt that at his work, he was learning way more through doing things rather than studying them.
MESA method
MESA is a radically efficient approach to how work should be done. We go from a problem to a built solution, that covers all the necessary aspects for its implementation, in short periods of time. 3 days, 5 days. The whole methodology can be summarized with the formula:
a leader
+
a team that has every piece of knowledge and every skill you need
+
a mission
Conceive, develop and prototype solutions to extraordinary challenges in 5 days
you have a leader, someone who is committed to the result
+
you have a team that has everything that you need
+
you have a concrete mission, something people have to build – rather than a theme that people need to debate.
It’s quite extraordinary how humans can behave if you ask them to use their critical brain and how much more efficient they will be if you create an environment for them to use their creative brain.
The boldest and craziest solution that you’ve come up with so far
I believe in the power of simplicity so I’m rarely looking for something bold and crazy! I’m usually looking for the essential and truthful. Sometimes that leads us to building an entire gym facility in 5 days. Or reproducing a rainbow artificially onto a landscape.
Working with Kobe Bryant
Kobe was an excellent entrepreneur and he wanted to create a legacy without having to build a heavy structure. He wanted to create an impact business that directed at least 75% of resources into the impact itself. He never got the chance to implement the solution we designed together due to the accident.
Your business today, 13 years later since the first MESA
Building something that uses no benchmarks or follows any pre-formulated answers is hard and fun.
I feel MESA is a very young company, coming into its teenage years. We are still making a lot of mistakes and eager for extraordinary growth.
What you learnt developing MESA
I learned what MESA is, what it could be and what it will not be.
I learned that, despite what people think about what a company or an entrepreneur should be doing, there are things that make sense for you and other things that don’t. And the things that don’t make sense for you, even if there are right or if they are the common way forwards or if they are the recommended approach… if they don’t make sense for the leader of an organization they will not happen. Not sure this is a good or a bad thing. It’s a thing I’ve learned.
Your connection with Unfinished
I absolutely love the sense of community that surrounds Unfinished. When I came for the first time, in 2019, I crashed a wedding with Esther Perel, Kitra Cahana, Luca Zamoc and a few other amazing humans. It’s the kind of experience that connects people for life – and it for sure connected me with Unfinished for life.
What will you share at Unfinished this year?
I’m looking forward to a very intimate conversation, telling stories – causos, as they say in my homeland, which are true stories that may or may not be exaggerated! – and reflecting on why we work.
#Praxis. A personal story
I have always been driven by practice. Even at University, when I had to choose a theme for my graduation dissertation, I wasn’t happy doing just the theoretical part of it. So, together with a group of extraordinary women, we did a Paper on Women & Sex as well as a documentary showing women speaking about sex.
Your message for people who want to make their work a mix between pleasure and exceptional results
I think the most important thing to remember is that pleasure is not the opposite of being result-driven. In fact, I believe that the more result-driven an environment is, the more rewarding it feels for humans.
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