Rio Center Stories: Washington Bonfim, Leadership in a Challenging Century alumnus

Washington Bonfim, Leadership in a Challenging Century alumnus, shares his experience during the two-week executive education program held on campus in New York.

November 28, 2017
The Leadership in a Challenging Century class in front of Alma Mater on campus, in New York. Washington Bonfim is in the back, wearing sunglasses. Photo: Maria Luiza Paranhos

I’m very pleased and grateful to share my thoughts on my experience during the Leadership in a Challenging Century course.

To making this testimonial more meaningful, I took the liberty to write to my classmates, doing some research on their impressions, I thought this could help me to bring to you more than an individual point of view, establishing a broader vision on our experiences.

We were a group of 14 students, mostly from the public sector, especially with nine federal employees, which work for very important bureaucracies such as our Ministry of Finance, our National Development Bank, the Staff of the Presidency of the Republic, and finally a representative of one of the federal regulatory agencies, called INMETRO.

At the state level, there were a Secretary of Sustainable Municipalities of the State of Pará, and an employee of the Water and Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo, Sabesp.

Two other participants came from the municipal level of government in Brazil, both working at the planning secretaries of our municipalities: myself, at the time Secretary of Planning of my home state, Teresina; and another colleague from Niterói, the Deputy Secretary of Planning.

Finally, we were honored to have as classmate, Regina Esteves, representing Comunitas.

I dare to say that all of us have this great feeling that we had a very good experience: the curriculum was extremely well designed, mixing excellent lectures and meaningful site visits, which brought to us a view of the challenges that we, as public servants, are facing in these times of fast changes, that are imposing the necessity of a better understanding of the limits and possibilities of our current institutional arrangements.

One point that struck me the most was the perception that our professors had on Brazilian problems, especially with regards to corruption and the lack of leadership that are so characteristic of these last three or four years, since the start of the Lava Jato investigations.

Possibly, it could sound a bit obvious that every crisis brings an opportunity for innovation and rearrangements of our institutional design, but hear and understand how, for example, New York City recovered from its bad moments so few decades ago, for myself was extremely encouraging and inspiring. Set aside the fact that some of our lectures were given by the very people who participated actively in the recovering process.

Then, innovation was our great lesson.

So broadly put, the word seems somehow vague, but my colleagues, such as Julieta Verleun, reported that she, as a member of the Ministry of Finance, is leading a project in partnership with the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), on integration of public services, which was one of her great lessons from the course, the project has a very evocative name: “Simplifying Lives”.

In this same approach, Izabela Jatene, as a State Secretary of Pará, a northern state in the Amazon Region, also inspired by our classes has been developing an environmental project with an integrated perspective to produce information in order to monitoring environment in that part of the Amazon Forest, it is called CIMAN, Integrated Center for Environmental Monitoring.

Leadership in a Challenging Century (July 10-21, 2017)

There were also other lessons learned, and here I quote a presentation done by Marilia Ortiz, Deputy Secretary of Planning here in Niterói. She mentioned some very important lessons:

  • Values as key drivers of our efforts in the public sector, especially in dealing in such hard times of ethical, political and economic crises such those we are living in;
  • Ethics, the role of transparency and accountability for reestablishing people’s trust in government;
  • The challenges that involve communication and new technologies, how to express correctly and be able to inspire other people on our projects and having the ability to put new ideas and approaches forward;
  • The role that cities have on economic growth and the understanding that innovation and best practices are coming from very different and sometimes, unexpected places, around the world.

But I can also mention some impressions a lot more personal, that come from the heart of my colleagues and myself. I must emphasize how everyone of us was pleased to attend a course at Columbia University, one of the greatest universities in the world.

But this remark does not tell the whole history: we were very well treated and have lots of words of gratitude to all of our teachers, but very especially to our two “Marias”, Paranhos [Project Coordinator at Columbia Global Centers | Rio de Janeiro] and Cecília [Manager of Executive Education and Training at SIPA].

As I mentioned before, the mix of subjects, given in lectures done by very experienced and great professors, with excellent site visits, such as to the Fire Department of New York and RED, just to list a few, was very productive.

Finally, speaking for myself it was such a great and impactful opportunity, in which I consolidated the thought of moving to São Paulo, to work with Comunitas, and now, even to move to Brasilia, to take the post of Deputy Ministry of Cities, something that I have to decide this very week.

I thank you all for everything and hope to stay connected to Columbia Global Centers | Rio de Janeiro.