Adriana Cisneros on her journey to CEO of Grupo Cisneros
When Adriana Cisneros took on her position leading Cisneros, she was following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, who founded the eponymous company in Venezuela in 1929 well before it was an entertainment, e-commerce and real estate powerhouse.
Recently, Adriana sat down with LionTree founder and CEO Aryeh Bourkoff at the Paley Center for Media in New York, sharing stories and wisdom gleaned from her unlikely journey to becoming the CEO of Cisneros, one of the largest privately held media entertainment organizations in the world. Here’s what we learned:
1. Do your best when no one is watching
Even though she was the daughter of an entrepreneur, Adriana could not depend on a succession plan. “I’m the one that they were not paying attention to. And this job was not meant to be for me,” she said, describing how a graduate school project caught the eye of her father and the former CEO of Cisneros. She wasn’t looking to get noticed, but her media analysis paper showed them that she understood the business and led to conversations about her taking over the company.
2. Make plans, but stay flexible
Thinking back on the events that led to her joining Cisneros, Adriana said, “I assumed I would join the family group at some point in my late 40s and I ended up taking over when I was 27 instead. Plans are great until they change and then they’re not plans anymore.” In planning, flexibility means that you know exactly what goal you are trying to achieve, but also that the path to it is not carved in stone.
3. Learn from the past
Successful leaders know that there are successful predecessors worth mimicking. “Every big deal that I’ve worked on in the past 10 years, I have looked to the past for clues into how to execute it,” Adriana said, explaining how she learns from the experiences of others, using both successful and failed endeavors to inform her decisions. When structuring the Cisneros Facebook deal, she copied a deal that her father put together for Direct TV fifteen years prior. “There’s a lot of questions that have already been answered by our own business, and we do have this corporate memory that helps us figure out what were the lessons learned and how we can improve certain terms.”
4. Play the long game
On paying attention to market cycles and preparing for change, Adriana offers the following insight: “We are always playing it so long, we’re playing it 50 years forward. Everything that we do, that is our horizon. The way that we build our businesses and the way that we approach different geographies with that mindset really lets us build something that is resilient to those changes. We pay attention. We play the game as well, but we’re not in a constant panic.”
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Listen to Adriana in conversation with Aryeh Bourkoff, the CEO and founder of LionTree, as part of the Paley Dialogues Series embedded below, and available on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn or wherever you get your podcasts.
