Embracing Humanistic Management at Global Network Week

This spring, I traveled to Mexico City for the first time through Global Network Week (GNW), a program that sends Yale SOM students on weeklong exchange programs to business schools around the world. I took a course called “Leading Through Humanistic Management” at EGADE Business School’s Santa Fe campus. As a student in the Global Business and Society program preparing to begin my career in securitized finance, dedicating a full week to leadership theory and organizational ethics might seem like an unusual priority. Yet that is precisely why I chose it. Building theoretical foundations around what kind of leader I aspire to be, and what kind of leaders I will seek as mentors and role models, has value long before managing my own team.

I stayed in Roma Norte, a vibrant and cosmopolitan Mexico City neighborhood from which I carpooled each morning to the business district of Santa Fe, home to the EGADE campus—a commute that in itself offered a cross-section of the city’s contrasts. Driving through residential Condesa’s tree-lined streets and trendy Polanco’s gleaming storefronts before arriving at Santa Fe’s corporate towers made the city’s layered inequalities legible in real time, as did the hours-long commutes of the workers who make that same journey daily from far beyond these neighborhoods.

From the first session, Professors Molina and González López framed the week around what scholar Adam Tooze has termed the “polycrisis”—the convergence of simultaneous economic, environmental, political, and institutional crises. In turn, they asked us to consider what that rupture demands of business leaders and the organizations they run. For someone entering a field defined principally by quantitative rigor, this reframe was challenging. Indeed, as a young professional, it can be tempting to get lost in the weeds of tasks, neglecting the macroeconomic forces driving business deals and failing to consider how these deals affect the bigger picture.

One of the week’s most memorable moments came from guest speaker Elizabeth Nava García, founder and CEO of the Mexican biodegradable packaging company Entelequia. Her perspective on employee flourishing went far beyond conventional corporate wellness programs. She spoke about offering therapists during working hours, incorporating temazcal and other traditional Mexican spiritual ceremonies into her employees’ lives, and extending her hiring practices to include people with schizophrenia and formerly incarcerated individuals. This truly subversive conception of inclusion pushed well past conventional diversity checkboxes. I also appreciated her deliberate ownership of not just her CEO status, but of her motherhood and of the inextricability of the female experience from her leadership vision. She delivered her talk entirely in Spanish, which turned into an unexpected bonding experience: our course coordinator Professor Molina and Spanish-speaking students from across the cohort stepped in to translate and mediate in real time, transforming this potential barrier into a small act of intercultural solidarity.

The week’s undisputed highlight for me was the guest lecture by Juan Muldoon, chief people officer of Grupo Bimbo. With over 153,000 associates across 39 countries and more than 100 brands, Grupo Bimbo is the world’s largest baking company and a prime example of growth through acquisition. What struck me even more than the scale was the provocative argument that humanistic management—treating people as ends rather than means—is not merely a normative aspiration but a measurable competitive advantage. Grupo Bimbo has the numbers to back this claim, sustaining aggressive global growth while consistently ranking among the best places to work in its markets.

In class, we also had the chance to run a human rights simulation in which we role-played various stakeholders in a negotiation over an infrastructure project. Through the exercise, I discovered how quickly deadlocks form when parties with asymmetric power are brought to the same table. A fellow student, for instance, argued that no party truly has a non-negotiable position; Professor Maher, drawing on his own dealmaking experience, pushed back: sometimes they do. That exchange dismantled assumptions I had carried from prior negotiation coursework and introduced a more honest complexity into how I think about deal dynamics.

I used my evenings in Mexico City to explore local history and art: the folkloric ballet at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Popular, the Memorial del 68 honoring victims of the Tlatelolco Massacre, and the city’s lucha libre wrestling scene. These experiences also deepened my understanding of the cultural and institutional context within which the businesses we studied operate.

Our final team presentation called us to conduct a hypothetical company audit through the lens of the B Lab standards introduced by guest speaker Azael Alvarado of Sistema B, as well as other principles we’d studied during the course. Rather than accepting the company’s external narrative at face value, we examined third-party evidence, supply chain conduct, and the gaps between stated values and verifiable practice, reflecting continuous, multi-dimensional accountability.

After the course ended, I flew to Puerto Escondido on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where I swam in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Growing up in Greece, the sea has always been central to my life, but standing by the world’s largest ocean, and then at over 8,200 feet of elevation in San José del Pacífico, all within the same day, looking out over a diversity of landscapes utterly unlike anything I had witnessed before, carried symbolic weight that is difficult to articulate. There is so much world still to discover.

Back at Yale SOM, my GNW experience inspired me to enroll in Business Ethics with Professor Beth-Ann Helgason. What I find so compelling about the course is that it does not prescribe a specific code of ethics, but challenges students to critique existing frameworks and forge their own, then consider how those frameworks translate into organizational decisions. It is a natural complement to my study of humanistic management during GNW: if humanistic management tells you that human dignity should anchor organizational life, business ethics forces you to interrogate what you are prepared to defend when the answer is inconvenient.

Humanistic management will not solve every tension in organizational life, and I did not depart from Mexico City thinking it would. I did leave with a richer vocabulary for the kind of leader I want to become, a set of frameworks for evaluating the deals and institutions I will work within, and the conviction that technical excellence and human-centered leadership need not be condemned to compete for priority. Alternative models are emerging, in academia and for practitioners. Humanistic management and conscious capitalism are among them—but as SOM alumni, it will be up to us to pioneer our own.