🔍 This article was co-created with Sergio Mariano García, CEO of the consulting firm S4P Consulting and Corporate Strategy Director (external advisor) at Birziplastik (🇪🇸 Spain).
🎙️ Keru Podcast is a series of conversations (in Spanish) with industrial leaders from Latin America about management, technology and decision-making in complex environments.
🔁 Keru is a podcast created by Globalita.io, where we talk with those who lead Latin American industry from the inside.
📲 Follow us on LinkedIn: Globalita and Keru Podcast
Problem / challenge: leading without certainties in the plastics industry
In an environment like the plastics industry, marked by changing regulations, geopolitical tensions, social pressure for sustainability and expectations of circularity, strategic leadership is not exercised from theory, but from the ability to navigate between rigid structures and constant emergencies. The demand is twofold: sustain the business while transforming the operating logic.
The general manager can no longer operate as a mere executor of an annual plan. The volatility in the prices of inputs such as polyethylene, the tightening of regulations in the European Union and the regulatory ups and downs in Latin America force them to move with peripheral vision and simultaneous focus. This requires a deep understanding of the entire value chain: from the sourcing of recyclable raw materials to the traceability of post-consumer products.
Sergio Mariano García Birziplastik, CEO of S4P Consulting and Corporate Strategy Director (external advisor) at Birziplastik, is a chemist by training and an industrial strategist. He has worked through almost every link in that chain: from R&D laboratories to general management in industrial SMEs. His experience in family businesses, technology startups and regulated industries allows him to see clearly that:
“The skills that got you to the general management role are not the ones that will keep you there.”
— Sergio Mariano García, CEO of S4P Consulting and external advisor at Birziplastik
Companies in the plastics sector face a triple pressure: operational profitability, regulatory compliance and public perception. Improving internal indicators is no longer enough. It is necessary to develop an industrial leadership capable of managing structural tensions without losing strategic vision.
In this context, Birziplastik must not only meet its customers’ technical requirements, but also anticipate changes in environmental legislation, pursue certifications, retrain its operating staff and manage logistics alliances. The strategy director cannot fully delegate these challenges. He must integrate himself as a technical and cultural leader at the same time.
“An industrial CEO does not lead from the control tower. He has to go down to the field, understand the bottlenecks and keep his finger on the pulse of the operation.”
— Sergio Mariano García, CEO of S4P Consulting and external advisor at Birziplastik
Reflections on the problem: flexibility without losing direction
Sergio Mariano García maintains that true adaptability is not tactical, but strategic. It is not about moving fast, but about knowing when to move and when to hold. The confusion between agility and dispersion has led many general managers to operate without focus, chasing urgency without building sustainable organizational capabilities.
“It is not just about being flexible. It is about knowing when to be a generalist and when to go back to your specialty to support the team from the inside.”
— Sergio Mariano García, strategic advisor at Birziplastik
This is where the distinction between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems in the Cynefin model (Snowden & Boone, Harvard Business Review, 2007) makes sense. Many leaders try to apply standard solutions to complex contexts. The result is frustration, team burnout and loss of competitive advantage.
In the plastics industry, decision cycles are rarely linear. The quality of recycled pellets, spot prices of polyethylene or the availability of technical additives can change within days. Trying to predict from Excel what must be decided from the Gemba is one of the most common mistakes. That is why Sergio insists on leading from real contact with the operation, without losing the systemic vision.
His approach is close to what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility (Antifragile, 2012): designing structures that not only withstand uncertainty, but benefit from it. This means investing in operational talent, decentralizing decisions, creating functional buffers and encouraging critical thinking even in operational positions.
“An antifragile CEO does not fear change. He turns it into an organizational advantage.”
— Sergio Mariano García, CEO of S4P Consulting
At the level of cultural management, he also distinguishes between organizations that survive by adapting passively and those that evolve consciously. This approach draws on the thinking of Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, 1990), especially the idea of building learning organizations. To do so, the general manager must model continuous learning: own up to mistakes, reformulate hypotheses, iterate on decisions without fear of exposure.
“If you cannot model change and learning from general management, who is going to do it?”
In short, adaptability is not simply reacting. It is redesigning the frames of meaning from which decisions are made. It is reformulating the very concept of control. In industrial environments with high entropy, control is not rigidity: it is the capacity to respond with direction.
Solutions applied in industrial general management
In the approach of Sergio Mariano García, CEO of S4P Consulting and external strategic advisor at Birziplastik, solutions do not emerge from a manual, but from direct experience with multiple organizational realities. From family businesses in the midst of succession to European firms with strict ESG standards, he has designed action frameworks that combine strategic thinking with tactical intervention.
🔎 a) Capability diagnosis before taking on the role
A critical practice is what he calls an adaptability audit. Before intervening, he maps active, passive and obsolete capabilities. This makes it possible to decide not only what to do, but who can do it best within the team. Here he applies principles from Ronald Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers, where the leader’s role is not to have all the answers, but to build the environment for them to emerge.
“The first thing I do when I take on a role is review which capabilities I have to leave behind and which ones I need to activate or learn.”
This audit serves as the basis for activating internal reskilling processes, redistributing critical decisions and delegating out of trust, not out of urgency. It also translates into a map of vulnerabilities: areas where there are no trained second lines or where operational knowledge is tacit.
🧰 b) Active delegation as a focus-multiplying system
Delegating is a misunderstood art. Sergio proposes a system of active delegation, where the focus is not on washing one’s hands of things, but on boosting the other person’s performance. To do this, he adapts tools such as OKRs (John Doerr, Measure What Matters, 2018) and models of operational empowerment.
“A poorly delegated decision consumes more time than doing it yourself. But a well-delegated one multiplies the general manager’s focus.”
OKRs are used as a flexible architecture, not as a contract. The goal is to generate alignment and follow-up conversations that make it possible to delegate within a framework, but without stifling creativity. In industrial environments with critical operations, this makes it possible to act with control without the need for rigidity.
This model has been applied at Birziplastik in areas such as technical purchasing, maintenance planning and reverse logistics, where excessive dependence on the CEO created bottlenecks. By institutionalizing active delegation, the lead time of non-urgent decisions was reduced by more than 40%.
📊 c) Time management: impact, urgency and political capital matrix
One of the greatest resources a CEO has is their availability. Sergio structures his agenda around three axes:
- Real economic impact (margin, cash flow, risk)
- Immediate operational risk
- Internal political capital (when to be visible, where to reinforce)
“Many things are urgent for others, but not important for the organization. The key is to teach the team to filter before escalating.”
This approach is partly inspired by the Eisenhower Matrix, but with industrial adjustments: instead of “important/not important”, business impact is measured. The CEO’s time is directed not only toward the strategic, but toward sustaining operational culture at critical moments.
An example: at Birziplastik, Sergio decides to be present at internal quality audits, even when his signature is not required. The goal is to uphold the standard through presence, not through speeches.
🔧 d) Conflict resolution: designing productive tensions
Sergio maintains that not all conflict is bad. Well-designed tensions can be catalysts for innovation. What matters is not allowing them to escalate without a framework. That is why he promotes a “decentralized resolution” system with three principles:
- Every tension should first try to be resolved at the lowest possible level
- Decisions must be recorded for follow-up
- They only escalate to the CEO if there is a direct impact on critical KPIs
“Many conflicts reach the CEO because nobody had the courage to say: we will resolve this among ourselves.”
This system has worked especially well in areas with functional overlap such as logistics–sales or production–quality. Unnecessary political friction is avoided and responsible autonomy is reinforced.
📈 e) Agile strategic planning: quarterly cycles with monthly review
The planning vision Sergio proposes is aligned with what Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen put forward in Fast Strategy (2008): agile, iterative cycles with a light structure. At Birziplastik, he works with quarterly plans, each with measurable objectives, but open to iteration.
“Planning is not guessing. It is having a hypothesis for action based on what we know today. And reviewing it every month if necessary.”
This method reduces analysis paralysis, but also avoids falling into improvisation. Each cycle ends with a strategic retrospective, which analyzes:
- Which decisions worked
- Which signals from the environment were ignored
- Which new hypotheses need to be validated
This strengthens the organization’s adaptive muscle and makes it possible to connect day-to-day operations with medium-term challenges.
Final reflection: adaptability as the core of industrial leadership
Sergio Mariano García’s experience reveals that the true competitive advantage in the plastics industry no longer comes from having more assets, more machines or more market. It comes from having leaders who know how to learn faster than the environment changes.
“You can have a technical, commercial or financial profile. If you do not know how to adapt to your company, your people and the moment, you will fail anyway.”
Today, industrial leadership requires operating between European regulatory complexity and Latin American productive informality. It requires sustaining profitability indicators while transforming culture. It requires planning with incomplete data and deciding with purpose.
That is why Sergio does not define leadership as a role. He defines it as an integrated strategic competency. Adaptability, for him, is not changing for the sake of change, but sustaining a clear direction, with constant openness to redefining the path.
“The CEO does not need to have all the answers. He needs to ask the right questions, at the right moment, in the right tone.”
The big question this conversation with Sergio Mariano García leaves us with is:
Is your company training its leaders to operate in environments where the only certainty is change?
🔍 This article was co-created with Sergio Mariano García, CEO of the consulting firm S4P Consulting and Corporate Strategy Director (external advisor) at Birziplastik (🇪🇸 Spain).
🎙️ Keru Podcast is a series of conversations (in Spanish) with industrial leaders from Latin America about management, technology and decision-making in complex environments.
🔁 Keru is a podcast created by Globalita.io, where we talk with those who lead Latin American industry from the inside.
📲 Follow us on LinkedIn: Globalita and Keru Podcast
Sergio Moriano García is an international reference in the development of sustainable solutions with thermoplastics, with more than two decades of experience leading strategic projects in the chemical and advanced materials industry. He holds a degree in Chemical Sciences from the University of Zaragoza and is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at EAE Business School; he has built a career that integrates R&D, commercial management, circular economy and product innovation. Throughout his career, he has held technical and executive roles at leading companies such as Ercros, PolyOne (now Avient), Domo Chemicals, Avanzare and SABIC. At PolyOne, where he worked for 12 years, he led multicultural teams in Europe and India, promoting technical and sustainable compound technologies. Later, at Domo Chemicals, he led integration processes after key acquisitions and developed circular solutions from its Application Center. As General Manager of Avanzare, he drove internationalization toward strategic markets such as the U.S., China and Mexico. Later, at SABIC, he was responsible for global commercial agreements and the successful launch of new materials in the automotive sector. In addition, he was Corporate Strategy Director at BIRZIPLASTIK and founder of S4P Consulting, from where he advises companies on sustainable innovation, circular economy and materials development. His vision combines deep technical knowledge, market sensitivity and a commitment to industrial sustainability.
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