Leading through Volatility: Organizational Change in Peru and Argentina 2027

This course uses Peru and Argentina as a comparative laboratory for examining how leaders build, transform, and sustain organizations in volatile, high-stakes environments. Latin America offers some of the world's most instructive cases of organizational change: resource-dependent economies shifting their growth models, family conglomerates modernizing their governance, public institutions rebuilding legitimacy after periods of crisis, and firms navigating dramatic political transitions. Students will develop frameworks for leading change when institutions are fragile, stakeholder complexity is high, and the external environment is unpredictable – conditions increasingly relevant to global business well beyond the region.

Peru and Argentina represent a deliberate and productive contrast.

Argentina is the central case: one of the world's most consequential live examples of institutional volatility and radical economic transformation. A century of boom-and-bust cycles, repeated sovereign default, and shifting ideological experiments has produced a business environment unlike almost anywhere else – one where organizational leaders must be as agile as strategists, and where the rules can change faster than any plan can account for. Today, under President Milei's shock-therapy reform program, Argentina is dismantling decades of interventionist policy in real time: aggressive deregulation, public-sector contraction, the removal of currency controls, and a direct confrontation with entrenched interests. For MBA students, Argentina's current moment offers something no classroom case study can replicate – a country visibly rewriting its institutional architecture, and organizations that must adapt, resist, or fail.

Peru is the counterpoint: a country that achieved unusually consistent economic growth since the early 2000s through macroeconomic discipline and foreign investment, yet faces persistent governance instability, deep social fragmentation, and a political class that has failed to translate growth into legitimate institutions. Peru's story – of a country that got the economics largely right while the social contract remained contested – speaks directly to the sustainability of change initiatives and the limits of top-down transformation.

Together they offer an unusually rich set of cases through which to examine what organizational leadership looks like when the external environment is not a stable given. Classroom sessions will cover the history, culture, society, and economic context of both countries before exploring five clusters of core content: why nations fail – the role of institutions, corruption, and extractive politics in shaping the business environment; leading in low-trust environments, drawing on research into how organizations build credibility and followership when the surrounding system is compromised; family business and conglomerate governance, which dominates Latin American capitalism; managing through political volatility and complex multi-stakeholder environments where the state is simultaneously customer, regulator, and source of risk; and the HUMAN model of leadership – Humanizing, Unscripted, Moral, Adaptive, and Narrative – a framework for distinctively human leadership in an era of accelerating technological change. Sessions will include faculty lectures, case discussions, guest speakers, and student group project work.

In-country, students will meet with a diverse set of organizations across the corporate, public-sector, and civil society in Buenos Aires, Mendoza, and Lima, conduct original primary research for their group projects, and participate in structured debriefs designed to integrate their field observations with the course frameworks.