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Sample Essay

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Identify someone you regard as a hero, a leader or role model whom you admire. Describe how this person has influenced your development.

The most effective leader I have known is my current client, Alvaro Moraes, the CEO of Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) in southern Brazil. By observing him at work, I discovered that he is a talented strategist with superior analytical skills. Yet I believe what has really fuelled his professional success is his outstanding capacity to motivate, train, direct, reward, and retain employees. 

Mr. Moraes is not the kind of CEO who only attends meetings with the board of directors; on the contrary, he talks to everybody in the company and knows most of the 1,214 employees by name. He is capable of pushing for better results while reconciling the use of pressure with a friendly environment. For instance, he realized that TIM's profit could increase by 30% if the company reduced customers' bad debt by 50%, a challenging but feasible goal. Together with the COO, he devised a plan and closely followed the collective effort to meet the objective. I often heard him incentivating employees by personally encouraging and congratulating them.

Although I have successfully led teams through specific efforts and even applied some of Alvaro's lessons -- defend your point incisively and be humble, coherent, and self-confident -- at this point in my career I do not feel fully prepared to lead a big, complex organization. Long-term leadership of large groups of people requires evaluating colleagues' capacity and delegating tasks. These are important skills I intend to further develop at Harvard through classes like Leadership and Organizational Behavior, through a commitment to teamwork, and through initiatives such as the Leadership and Ethics Forum. I feel confident that, by the time I launch my own venture, I will resemble Mr. Moraes in his abilities as a people-oriented manager. 

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