Eduardo Ribeiro

Only a top-down commitment can achieve change like Magazine Luiza’s, a point the company’s executive team made explicit in their Q4 2016 earnings statement: “Technology [must move] from the background to center stage — and [be] seen as the brain of the business … Hierarchical structures, paralyzed by excessive bureaucracy, the fear of change and attachment to past successes, usually strongly reject the digital culture.”

This initial project grew into a larger ecosystem. In-store associates can use an app not only to look up product and inventory information, for example, but also to allow customers to pay on the spot, without waiting in line. Magazine Luiza built ways for customers to apply for credit, to buy technical support and other add…

Like many other corporate leaders, Trajano formed an innovation team to address the shift — but unlike a number of his peers, he recognized innovation can’t occur at the fringes of the company, walled off from any opportunities to disrupt the main business. Consequently, he both removed this team from the organization’s existing governance processes, allowing it to experiment with technologies without running into bureaucratic obstacles, and empowered it to work directly on Luiza’s core e-commerce business.