Adolfo Menezes Melito

(Creativity + Connection) x Innovation
The Melito Formula!

Creativity and innovation in any field of business are the key to outstanding success. This is the maxim of the professional life of 52-year old executive Adolfo Menezes Melito, who has worked for 20 years in executive positions.

Melito’s professional success is also the result of a more recent belief: “make your competitor irrelevant”. This concept was developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the authors of the bestselling book “Blue Ocean Strategy” (published in the United States in 2005). This concept is closely followed by Melito.

The third leg of an inspirational career is the fact that Melito lovingly cultivates personal and business relationships. "Investing in knowledge and relationships is the definitive way to personal, professional, and business success", he states firmly.

1975 Economics

Melito was born in the town of Itobi, State of São Paulo. He is married to Vanda Naoko Miyagi Melito. They met in college when they were both students at the “Faculdade de Ciências Econômicas e Administrativas da Fundação Santo André” (the School of Economics and Business Administration of the Santo André Foundation) from where they graduated in 1975.

Soon after graduating from college, Melito left São Paulo to assume his first managerial position, taking his wife and their newborn son Adriano, now 30 years old, with him. More specifically, Melito became the manager of the foreign trade department at Becton Dickinson, an American company that manufactured medical and surgical products. The company was based in the city of Juiz de Fora, State of Minas Gerais.

1980 Expanding the Foreign Market

After five years, having been promoted to the position of Supplies Manager of Becton Dickinson, Melito began to plan his return to São Paulo. However, he was invited to work at Swedish company Facit, which at that time was owned by the Electrolux Group, whose head office was located in Juiz de Fora. Melito was invited to head the foreign trade department, with emphasis on exporting. As a result, he postponed his plans of going back to São Paulo.

Those were turbulent times, during which demands on the Juiz de Fora unit increased because of the world-wide sale of Ericsson. Melito took on additional responsibilities, apart from those related to Foreign Trade. He was asked to head the company’s Logistics, Administrative and Financial Operations. This professional growth provided him the experience that led to his promotion to the position of superintendent of Facit, at the end of 1984. Under his leadership, the company sales grew to include more than 100 countries, accounting for 30% of the company’s business. This diversity of markets and the volume of business negotiations rendered him a number of awards. At that time, the executive became acquainted with Fundação Dom Cabral and met Emerson Almeida, the foundation’s president, who was active in foreign trade through CEDEX.

Facit relocated Melito to São Paulo in 1985. His family now included a daughter, born in the State of Minas Gerais. Amanda is now 20 years old.

Facit was an outstanding company in terms of market share and results. To exemplify, Melito headed, in the name of Ericsson, the sale of the company to the Machline Group. This sale was a consequence of the barriers to foreign investments that existed at that time.

1987 Innovation

In 1987, Melito became general director of Interprint Formulários, a company owned by Swedish and British groups. Melito led the company on the path to expansion and improved results, thanks to the company’s entry into the market of higher aggregated value products, especially printed security material.

In 1991, he went back to the Ericsson group, where he took on the position of general director of Matec (which had also been the result of barriers to foreign investments). His challenge was to re-align the company within the new business scenario, in which the barriers to foreign investment and competition had been torn down, by providing the market with data communication products and solutions, in addition to the existing PABX and other well-known voice communication equipment.

1994 New Business Activities

At the end of 1993, Melito turned his career around by 180 degrees, when he accepted the invitation of Daniel Dazcal, whom he had met at the time he was working for Sharp (Machline Group). Dezcal invited him to take on an executive position at Tec Toy.

At the same time, Melito – who is passionate about knowledge, technology and innovation, and who goes through extensive professional recycling every two or three years - decided to invest in an international course. To this end, in 1994, he joined the 5th Group of the “Programa de Gestão Avançada - PGA” (the Advanced Management Program) run by the Dom Cabral foundation and Insead of France.

This academic endeavor added more expertise to his professional experience. That was a historic time in the market as Tec Toy had elbowed Estrela out of its leading position in the toy market. At Tec Toy, Melito was involved in the administrative and financial organization of the company and prospected for new business opportunities.

The move from Tec Toy and the field of entertainment to the cultural sector was a major leap forward. To deal with this move, Melito went to Columbia University in 1998, where he took Marketing Management Courses, after which he took a People Management course at the Disney Institute, in 1999. In that same year and in 2000, Melito attended the MBA program at ESPM – ITA to get an MBA degree.

2000 International Recognition

Melito then took on the position of director of the Instituto Alfa de Cultura, the cultural institute which owns Teatro Alfa (theater). He also became director of New Non-financial Business at Grupo Alfa.

The results of his management activities at Teatro Alfa are evidenced by the variety of cultural events held at the theater in 2000, 2001 and 2002, and are further evidenced by the fact that the number of season subscribers more than doubled, while sponsorship revenues from cultural events increased by 150%.

Melito’s work at Teatro Alfa provided the professional expertise to enable him to join the executive board of BrasilConnects. The cultural events organized by BrasilConnects in 2003 and 2004 were characterized by the significant growth of proceeds from, and attendance at, art shows in Brazil, such as the Picasso Exhibition, and abroad, namely in Japan and China. These events consistently achieved record numbers in terms of proceeds and public. In 2004, BrasilConnects was able to balance its results in the field of cultural events.

This professional growth and increasing familiarity with the related information and values have allowed Adolfo Melito to become an outstanding professional in terms of successfully heading organizations in a number of different markets.

The story does not end at this point. Melito has just come back from participating in the first "China - Oportunidades e Desafios" (China – Opportunities and Challenges) program run by the Dom Cabral foundation. The program was held in Shanghai, China, in partnership with Canada’s University of British Columbia and China’s Jiao Tong University. After all, the business world is Melito’s home, and he will certainly be present wherever new business opportunities are to be explored.