Full-time Professor

Maria Elisa Brandão

Maria-Elisa Brandão Bernardes holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration, with a concentration in Strategy and Small Business Management, from the joint doctoral program conducted by HEC Montréal and McGill University, Canada. She also holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), as well as Bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration from UFMG and Philosophy from the Pontifical Catholic University of Brasília.

She is a Full-time Professor at Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC), where she teaches in academic programs, including the DBA, Master’s, and MBA programs, as well as in executive education and public management programs in the fields of Strategy and Management. She also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the IPEAD Foundation (UFMG).

For more than two decades, she has worked in organizational development, strategic planning, and strategy execution as both a professor and consultant. Her research adopts a sociological perspective and draws on the Strategy-as-Practice approach to examine strategy processes, encompassing both formulation and implementation.

More recently, her work has focused on Open Strategy, an area in which she has become one of the thematic leaders at EnANPAD. Her research interests include:

  1. Strategy as Practice: Examining how strategy is developed and implemented through the daily actions, interactions, and practices of organizational actors.

  2. Open Strategy: Investigating how organizations involve internal and external stakeholders in strategy formulation and execution processes, fostering transparency, collaboration, and innovation.

  3. Strategic Planning and Execution: Understanding how organizations translate strategic intentions into effective actions and sustainable results.

  4. Organizational Development and Change: Exploring how organizations adapt, learn, and transform in response to evolving internal and external environments.