Leadership is about life, and yet too many workplaces are about the living dead. At living dead workplaces, people are sapped of their energy, of their will, of their desire to become; there, all creativity is beaten off them until mediocrity is instilled through conformity. This is why I called such places saladeros, places where people jerked beef while they unwittingly salted themselves out of life. The preserving technology may have changed, but the slow- kill process has not.

I contrasted the saladeros with the unbounded freedom of two gauchos, Fierro and Sombra, who roam across the continent drawing leadership and management lessons from popular revolts. I chose revolts because they can be viewed as organizations, and I chose mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth- century revolts because they preceded American Scientific Management and thus showed how Latin Americans used to manage themselves before business schools and multinationals set foot in the region and required conformity to foreign management techniques mostly designed by observing foreigners, not Latin Americans.

Not all is wrong with the management by multinationals, except that, for all the modern talk about adopting local physiognomy, their subsidiaries remain foreign. They are foreign in that their investment decisions, including those pertaining to innovation or strategy, are mostly made abroad, excluding local managers from the challenges that might allow them to develop to their full leadership potential.