From Student Organizing to Management Consulting
When Geanluca Lorenzon was a teenager living in Brazil, his father fell incredibly sick. Although the government had access to the medicine he needed, his father was denied public health care because the state argued the treatment was too costly for someone who was too sick to be saved. Fortunately for the Lorenzon family, an American pharmaceutical company was conducting a trial of a new drug in Brazil and through this trial, his father was cured. “That’s when I started to see that the state was not the answer,” Geanluca recalls.
Several years later, Geanluca became instrumental in expanding Students For Liberty’s operations throughout Brazil. While in law school, he was often persecuted in lectures for his free-market positions, finding himself the sole defender of liberty in a crowd of Marxist students and professors. Yet, outside of class, he was surprised to discover that several of his colleagues agreed with him but lacked the courage to speak up in public about liberty. That’s when he decided to found Clube Farroupilha to take care of that problem. In mid-2013, he associated Clube Farroupilha with Students For Liberty and began expanding it.
“Becoming a part of SFL was an opportunity to break new ground in the public debate. SFL not only gave me an opportunity to join a network that spreads the ideas of liberty, but it is also a network that is so rare in that it helped me grow professionally. With Students For Liberty, you’re going to learn skills that most universities won’t teach you.”
At the time, SFL had less than 50 active coordinators throughout Brazil and none in Geanluca’s home state. He became the first State Coordinator of Students For Liberty in Rio Grande do Sul and expanded the network throughout the state. His model of management was so successful that he was hired to replicate it in the whole of Brazil. Through this position, he set up the entire SFL Brazil and developed the selective processes that served as the basis for the organization’s current leadership programs. “I made sure that we developed people skilled in management. This was new for the student movement as most organizations were focused on activism, but nothing professional. The value of SFL’s training was that a student could say that they were part of this network and be proud of it.”
He later served as the Director of the Mises Brasil Institute, the country’s largest libertarian think tank, for two years. At that time Geanluca published a policy paper at the CATO Institute on strengthening the Rule of Law in Brazil, which ended up being quoted in the Wall Street Journal. While at Mises Brazil, he also published a book called “Fatal Cycles: Socialism and Human Rights” and this book was on the bestseller list in its category for weeks on Amazon. Though he was no longer formally involved with Students For Liberty, as Director of the think tank, Geanluca “always made sure to hire SFL alumni or students who’d been through training because they knew how to think strategically, and how to design an efficient club and manage resources. So they could easily transfer those skills into the workplace.”
Today Geanluca works at the largest strategy consultancy on the planet, providing his management expertise to the largest corporations and governments in the world. On how he managed to make this career transition, Geanluca says, “If it wasn’t for the network, I’d not have received the opportunity to grow as a manager and pivot into the private sector. As a law student, I was not interested in management but SFL is about managing talent, resources, and teams. Although I’m a lawyer, my experience during my time with SFL helped me transition from law to management.”