“I joke that I promoted myself. I didn’t leave the chair because I was tired, sick or wanted to retire. I left because I wanted to expand my ability to build the future. The CEO chair is a very good, wonderful adrenaline rush, but it keeps you in the now. It gives you little space to look at other things. And I wanted to work on what comes next.” In this way, direct and full of business vision, the current VP of the Board of Grupo Boticário, Artur Grynbaum, explained the decision to leave the CEO position at the height of the company’s growth.
Today, in a position on the board with expanded executive role, Artur described his role as complementary to that of the current CEO in an interview with the podcast From Zero to Top, which tells stories of the men and women behind the big companies in Brazil.
“They run the plan from 0 to 3 years. I work from 3 to 10. If someone doesn’t provoke the present, the future won’t arrive. My role is to disrupt some of today’s certainties to ensure that the company exists strong tomorrow”, he states.
The speech reveals a rare vision in corporate environments: the ability to give up the top job. And it shows that leaving the position of chief executive did not mean a loss of influence. According to him, the change expanded the strategic reach.
This is the second time that the Grupo Boticário executive participated in the program From Zero to Top. After five years, Arthur Grynbaum spoke about changes in the company, such as his transition from CEO to the board, as well as revealing difficult decisions and global growth.
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Growth strategy
The job transition was also planned with political and cultural care. Artur recognizes that the change of command always generates internal tension, but argues that success lies in clarity of roles.
The strategic reconfiguration coincided with another decisive movement: the post-pandemic digital acceleration. According to Artur, the period was a watershed in the group’s structure. The most emblematic data is the growth in the technology area, which went from around 300 professionals before 2020 to almost 3,000 people in the following years.
“The pandemic took everyone out of beta. There was no more room for testing. It was real life. Either we accelerated, or we fell behind. Technology stopped being a support and became the backbone of the business.”
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He explains that the change was not just quantitative, but cultural. Areas that previously operated as support now occupy a strategic role within corporate decisions.
“Before, technology was seen as an order taker. Someone said ‘I want this’ and the area executed it. Today it sits at the strategic table. We took these areas out of the kitchen and put them in the living room. They started to think about the business together.”
For Artur, learning from the crisis was definitive. Large companies only survive if they learn to reorganize themselves at the speed of the digital world. “The world has accelerated brutally. It’s not about digitizing a process, it’s about changing the way of working. Those who don’t understand this think that technology is a tool. It’s not. It’s mentality”, he says.
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To find out more details about Arthur Grynbaum’s career at Grupo Boticário, see the full episode on . The program is available in its podcast version on the main streaming platforms such as , , , and
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About From Zero to Top
The Do Zero ao Topo podcast is a production of InfoMoney and brings, every week, the stories of prominent women and men in the Brazilian market to tell their story, sharing the biggest challenges faced along the way and the main strategies used in building the business.
