“Legacy is what remains when you have strengthened the people, culture, governance, and decision-making foundations of an organization not just its bottom line.”
–Cintia Scafutto de Menezes
Across more than thirty-five years and the full span of industries that defined the late twentieth and early twenty-first century economy, Cintia Scafutto de Menezes has made a habit of choosing growth over comfort and purpose over convenience. From co-founding one of Brazil’s first internet service providers before most people understood what the internet was, to leading operations across thirty-seven countries and closing businesses with dignity when sustainability demanded it, to building the governance, ESG, and leadership frameworks that are now shaping organisations across the Americas and beyond, her career is defined not by a single great achievement but by the cumulative weight of courageous decisions made consistently over decades. She has been named a Global 200 Women Power Leader for 2026. She has earned it by doing the work, over and over again, in places where it was difficult.
CHOOSING GROWTH OVER COMFORT: THE DECISIONS THAT SHAPED A CAREER
Cintia’s career has been shaped by a specific kind of courage: the willingness to step away from stability when something more important was within reach. Her earliest demonstration of this came when she left a secure role to co-found one of the first internet service providers in Brazil. At a time when the internet was still largely unfamiliar to the public, building something from scratch in that space required not just technical understanding but entrepreneurial conviction and an appetite for uncertainty. That experience gave her something that no corporate ladder could have provided: a foundational understanding of what it means to build, to fail productively, and to turn vision into execution.
The thread continued. Moving to São Paulo for a new leadership role meant leaving her support network behind. Joining an international project for the development of a new Mercedes-Benz plant placed her in a highly complex, multidisciplinary environment that expanded her understanding of leadership well beyond technical execution. And accepting responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean, a role spanning thirty-six countries, tested her in ways that no previous chapter had. It required learning Spanish, navigating dramatically different cultural and business realities, and making decisions that included closing operations in countries where sustainability was no longer possible. Doing that with dignity and humanity, she reflects, was one of the greatest leadership tests of her career. (missing moved abroad to US when assumed VP Americas role).
LEGACIES, NOT STRATEGIES: A PHILOSOPHY GROUNDED IN CONTINUITY
The phrase that most consistently defines Cintia’s leadership philosophy is one she has returned to across very different contexts: building legacies, not just strategies. The distinction matters to her precisely because strategy is necessary but insufficient. A strategy executed brilliantly can still leave an organisation weaker than it found it if the people, culture, governance, and decision-making foundations have not been strengthened in the process. Legacy, in her definition, is what remains when the title and the tenure are gone.
In practice, this means consistently asking what is being built that will continue to create value in the future. It means developing successors, not just delivering results. It means making decisions that are not only effective but ethical and sustainable. And it means that the most revealing test of a leader’s legacy is not how they perform when things go well but how they lead through difficulty: whether they handle transitions with humanity, whether they tell the truth under pressure, whether they leave an organisation with stronger foundations than they inherited. These are the standards Cintia applies to her own leadership, and they are the standards she advocates for wherever she advises.
GOVERNANCE, ESG, AND INNOVATION: THREE PILLARS, ONE SYSTEM
Cintia is deliberate about rejecting the tendency to treat governance, ESG, and innovation as separate corporate functions with separate owners and separate reporting lines. In her view, they are deeply interconnected, and their separation is precisely what prevents organisations from achieving lasting impact. Governance provides the structure, accountability, and decision-making discipline that keep organisations focused and resilient. ESG brings a broader lens on value creation, ensuring that business decisions account for people, communities, ethics, and long-term sustainability. Innovation is what allows organisations to remain relevant and adaptive as the world around them changes.
“True gender equity is not achieved through discourse alone. It happens when inclusion is built into the way organizations operate, reward, and lead.”
When these three elements are genuinely integrated rather than siloed, organisations are measurably better at managing risk, making intelligent decisions, and creating value that compounds over time. The integration, however, cannot be structural alone. It must be embedded in leadership behaviour, in performance conversations, in the criteria by which decisions are made at every level. Sustainable impact, she argues, is not achieved by any single initiative. It is achieved when an organisation can grow, transform, and innovate while remaining trustworthy, responsible, and aligned with the future it is trying to help build.
INSTITUTO MEO AND THE SYSTEMIC WORK OF GENDER EQUITY
Through Instituto MEO, Cintia has committed herself to the advancement of women in leadership in a way that reflects her broader conviction that meaningful change requires systemic intervention, not simply good intentions. The gender equity gap in leadership, she argues, is not primarily a pipeline problem. It is a systems problem, rooted in how organisations identify talent, develop people, sponsor careers, and define what leadership success looks like. Addressing it requires changing those systems.
Her critique of how DEI programmes are often implemented is characteristically direct. When diversity, equity, and inclusion are treated as generic, stand-alone agendas disconnected from business strategy and leadership accountability, they generate resistance rather than transformation. Truly inclusive organisations do not treat inclusion as a parallel workstream. They build it into the way they operate, recruit, reward, and develop talent. Leaders must be held genuinely accountable for creating real pathways for women to advance. Development must be personalised rather than programmatic. And equity must be measurable, not just aspirational.
BOARDS, CRISIS, AND THE DEMANDS OF FUTURE-READY GOVERNANCE
As a board advisor, Cintia brings an unusually complete view of the pressures facing governance today. The expectations placed on boards have expanded dramatically beyond financial oversight and compliance. Boards are now expected to navigate technological disruption, cybersecurity risk, AI implications, geopolitical instability, reputation management, culture, and ESG accountability, all simultaneously and at a pace that previous governance frameworks were not designed to handle. The temptation is to manage this complexity through additional process. Cintia’s argument is that what is actually needed is a different quality of thinking: better questions, greater diversity of perspective around the table, stronger digital and AI literacy, and a genuine willingness to challenge assumptions about the future rather than simply ratify the recent past.
On crisis management, she is equally precise. Organisations should always operate with a state of preparedness, not because every crisis can be anticipated, but because preparation creates the structure, clarity, and role definition that allows a leadership team to respond with discipline when disruption arrives. In an era of hyperconnectivity, where a single incident can escalate into a reputational crisis within hours, the difference between a prepared organisation and an unprepared one is not measured in resources. It is measured in response time, judgment, and the quality of communication under pressure.
BUILD2THRIVE: THE FOUR PILLARS OF ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE
Through Build2Thrive, Cintia has developed a framework for resilience that reflects her conviction that the concept has been too narrowly defined. Resilience, in her formulation, is not simply the capacity to withstand pressure. It is the capacity to navigate uncertainty with clarity and adaptability, to remain grounded while continuously evolving. Her framework rests on four pillars. The first is curiosity: the ability to look beyond what is happening today and anticipate how different scenarios might unfold. The second is the capacity to sustain discomfort in an environment of constant disruption, where leaders are under relentless pressure to transform. The third is the courage to act without guarantees: to make decisions, take calculated risks, and adjust when necessary. The fourth is the willingness to deconstruct what no longer serves the organisation and rebuild with vision, creativity, and relevance.
This framework is not abstract. It is drawn from the specific pressures Cintia has navigated personally, and it reflects her understanding that the organisations most capable of sustained performance are not those that manage change the most efficiently, but those whose leadership has genuinely internalised the capacity to evolve without losing their foundational sense of purpose and values.
TECHNOLOGY, AI, AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INFORMED LEADERSHIP
As someone who co-founded an internet service provider when the internet was still largely theoretical to most Brazilians, Cintia has a perspective on technology’s transformative potential that spans the entire arc of the digital era. Her core argument about technology has remained consistent throughout: it is never the technology itself that transforms an organisation. It is the quality of the leadership applying it. That principle becomes more urgent, not less, as AI evolves and the decisions leaders must make about its use become more consequential.
What she advocates for is a particular combination of digital understanding, critical thinking, ethical awareness, and broad business judgment. Leaders who understand AI technically but lack ethical grounding will apply it irresponsibly. Leaders who understand its ethical dimensions but lack strategic acuity will fail to apply it effectively. The leaders capable of navigating AI’s implications well are those who bring all of these capacities to bear simultaneously, and who have done the ongoing learning required to develop them. This conviction is why continuous education at institutions such as Wharton and IMD has not been a luxury in Cintia’s career. It has been a leadership discipline.
A MESSAGE TO THE NEXT GENERATION: KNOW YOURSELF, LEAD WITH PURPOSE
The advice Cintia offers to the next generation of women leaders aspiring to global impact is grounded in the same self-awareness that has guided her own journey. Leadership, she reminds them, is a lifelong process of growth, not a destination reached at a particular title or milestone. The most dangerous obstacle for many talented women is not the external barrier but the internal one: the self-doubt that constrains ambition before anyone else has the chance to. Challenge it. Do not allow it to make your choices.
She asks aspiring leaders to remain humble enough to listen and learn, courageous enough to step into spaces where they belong, and self-aware enough to understand their own strengths, values, and growth edges. Find allies. Ask for help. And above all, build something that will matter beyond your tenure, your title, and the business cycle you happen to be working in. A legacy is not built in a single impressive moment. It is built through the accumulated quality of decisions made with integrity, care, and an unflinching commitment to purpose across a career. Cintia Scafutto de Menezes is building one, and she has been building it for more than thirty-five years.
