“I got insights I could apply directly to my own innovation needs in the cloud industry.
Danielle Jordão has a rare profile in international business. Her route to her current role as Head of Strategy and Scale Programmes for SAP in EMEA has been anything but conventional. She is an arts and humanities graduate, with a major in French and Portuguese from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – an unusual academic background for a business leader, perhaps. An MBA in 2009 helped accelerate her career at IBM at that time. But she has always felt a need to consolidate a deep understanding of the key tenets of business – to hone her expertise in linking financial performance to business strategy. And it’s this need that brought her to INSEAD and to the Business Strategy and Financial Performance programme in 2022; a choice made in part because of the prestige of the school and in part because she was looking for a certain type of learning experience.
“INSEAD enjoys a reputation for absolute excellence internationally, and Business Strategy and Financial Performance really addressed my specific needs beautifully. But I was also looking for a programme that could work with my crazy agenda and the amount of travelling I was doing at that time. The online format of the programme really appealed to me. I could dip into the expertise I needed, when it worked for me.”
When Jordão began the programme in 2022, she was VP and Head of Customer Engagement and Experience for SAP Procurement in Latin America. It was a role that required her to think outside the box continuously, she says. And the programme delivered key takeaways that helped her and her team safeguard quality for their clients, while driving new enrollments and financial revenue.
“The programme was very rich with original real-world business cases from different industries that I could apply directly to all my own innovation needs in the cloud industry. I got real insights into how to enhance customer experience though the addition of certain technological tools in new and innovative ways.”
Transitioning, mid-programme, into a new role in her company, Jordão was also able to leverage one of the key components of the learning experience: the Action Learning Project or ALP. The ALP is an opportunity to consolidate new ideas, concepts and approaches week over week by applying them directly to a specific goal or challenge back in the workplace. For Jordão this was of huge value.
“In my new job, I had shifted to a new market and my remit was really about ensuring our customers were optimising SAP products and looking at ways to scale our offerings by driving customer engagement. In my ALP, I was able to utilise one of the case studies we explored from the healthcare sector and repurpose these ideas and frameworks to use them within my role. It was incredibly valuable.”
Jordão is currently fine-tuning the strategy that she built during the programme and is preparing now for the execution stage. A key element of her success in this regard, she says, and in helping her to make the shift to her new role, was having a learning coach throughout the experience.
“Having a learning coach there to keep on track in your learning is just fantastic and not only from a technical or academic perspective. Because I was making a major transition, geographically as well as professionally, my learning coach really stepped up to help me organise the programme around my personal changes and keep pace with the work at a way that minimised disruption. She was also available with advice that I found incredibly empowering and motivational.”
Jordão also fully appreciated the degree of flexibility around timings of the programme’s live and interactive sessions with faculty and fellow peers – an opportunity, she says, to share input and ask direct questions around the issues and themes that are most relevant to different learners.
“The mix of techniques deployed throughout the programmes, from synchronous sessions to videos to quizes is great. The amount of content that you process in the BSFP is just huge, so the video format, where so many ideas are condensed so richly, really enables you to pause, stop and research or reflect on what you are learning. And to watch the material again to ensure that I was really digesting what I was seeing and hearing.”
Jordão would “totally recommend” the programme to others looking to consolidate their knowledge. So much so that she now intends to go on and pursue her next online programme at INSEAD. “It’s a fantastic learning experience.”
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