Andrés Cardó, Prisa Group (A)

Andrés Cardó, CEO of PRISA Radio, has a bachelor's degree in economics and humanities from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. He studied Finance in the Senior Management Program (PAD) at ESAN business school in Lima. He has been with PRISA for 25 years, his entire career, since he started the Executive MBA at IESE in 1988, in Madrid. Previously, he had worked for the oil company Petroperú and for a Catalan textile group of the Güell family in the Peruvian capital. Andrés' father, the former Peruvian Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, had close relations with the Polanco family and several of the professionals who had founded the group. When he decided to do the full-time MBA in Barcelona, the founders of the company made him a proposal: "Why don't you do it in Madrid (part-time) and get professional experience at PRISA to balance out the academic experience at IESE?" During the first semester of the program, Cardó worked in the production department of the publishing house Santillana: graphics, logistics, paper purchasing, etc. In the second semester, he moved to the department of finance and administration. He says it was months "entrenched in the organization like all the other employees; but I did have the privilege to sit down with the executives and ask them whatever I wanted." When the second year of the MBA rolled around, Cardó moved to the publishing department. Finally, upon completing his studies, he received the following offer from Santillana's CEO: "Stay here two or three years, we will train you, and then we will transfer you to the Americas." In those years, there were still many countries where the group had little or no presence: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, etc. "We're going to internationalize. We have to conquer the Americas," said the founder during a historic meeting in Segovia in 1992. Cardó quickly adds: "What really shaped me from that period was having direct contact with the founders, mature professionals who had built Santillana with Jesús de Polanco at the helm."