Leading with Joy: Unlocking potential and driving performance through inspiring leadership - Paperback

Portela, Marvio: - MARVIO PORTELA is a Brazilian executive with more than three decades of international leadership experience in the technology sector, and a tireless advocate of the idea that extraordinary results and humane environments are inseparable concepts.Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Portela began his professional journey in sales at Xerox, a school that, in his own words, shaped an entire generation of professionals driven by targets, discipline, and rankings. It was there that he learned the value of productive pressure, and, in time, also the limits of overly aggressive cultures. From Xerox, his career would take him to leadership positions at major global corporations, including Unisys, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAS.At SAS, where he built the longest chapter of his career, he led the Latin America operation, delivering consistent results year after year. Under his leadership, the region became a global benchmark for the company, earning multiple Great Place to Work awards, and his teams became known for a rare combination of high performance and humanized management. He later expanded his scope to Asia and Oceania, and subsequently to the United States and Europe, culminating in a global leadership role. His way of leading became an internal reference for how to integrate distinct cultures within a single structure, navigating multiple cultural and business contexts.But reducing Portela to his corporate trajectory would mean missing a significant part of his story. Passionate about building new ventures, he was a partner at Aloha Pizzaria in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in service, food, and real estate businesses in the United States.These parallel experiences made him a more complete leader, one who moves naturally between the world of large technology corporations and that of small businesses, from the corporate boardroom to the counter of a food truck.Portela is married and the father of two daughters. He is a triathlete, and his discipline in endurance sports directly shapes his leadership philosophy: results are built through consistency, discipline, and joy.As a thinker, he has been a columnist for Forbes Brazil and has also written for MIT Technology Review. In these articles, he distills what he considers his main contribution to the management debate: the idea of radical commitment to delivery, but in environments where people work with a sparkle in their eyes. For Portela, no one should have to choose between being results-driven and being people-centered. The companies he most admires, and the teams he has most successfully led, are precisely those that refused to accept that false choice.