Culture, in Alejandro Betancourt López’s view, gets built through what a company actually does, not through the values it prints on a wall. Consistent action is the thing that shapes how people work.
That belief runs through the way he has run Hawkers and the way he talks about leadership more broadly. He ties an innovative culture directly to a company’s ability to keep growing.
Innovation as New Value
“Innovation isn’t just about technology; it’s about finding new ways to create value,” he said. When his group moved into African financial services, the aim was to serve unique local needs rather than transplant a Western template onto a very different market. Local problems, he found, needed locally built answers instead of borrowed ones.
That mindset, he argues, keeps an organization relevant and growing instead of coasting on whatever worked last year. Constant reinvention, in his experience, is what lets a company outmaneuver rivals with far deeper pockets. At Hawkers, he says, the edge came from a culture of experimentation rather than the biggest budget or the flashiest technology in the category.
Celebrate the Creative Risk
At Hawkers, he encouraged that spirit by celebrating creative risks even when they didn’t always pay off. The company set up “innovation days” where team members could work on experimental projects outside their usual lane.
Some of those experiments became key marketing campaigns. Rewarding the attempt rather than only the win is how he kept ideas flowing, and it turned a modest marketing budget into an edge over bigger competitors. Treating the occasional failure as the cost of trying, rather than a reason to punish, kept people willing to take the next creative swing.
Transparency and Room to Grow
Regular, honest communication about challenges turns employees into partners in the work, he says, and recognizing talent at every level builds the kind of loyalty that shows up in performance. He treats transparency as a plain management tool. People who can see the whole picture tend to make better calls inside their own corner of it.
He’d take the idea further if he could. He champions what he calls “Entrepreneurship Without Borders,” a movement to connect founders in emerging markets with mentors, investors and markets worldwide so that good ideas aren’t trapped by geography. The talent exists everywhere, he argues; what’s missing is access, and closing that gap could unlock enormous untapped potential.
