Founder and Academic Director · SMX – Strategic Management Experience
Micael Jardim is the founder and academic director of SMX – Strategic Management Experience, a Brazilian platform of interactive executive case studies inspired by the Harvard case method. SMX was born out of a question: why does the best management thinking — the kind used inside companies every day — have to be read like a textbook, instead of lived like a decision?
His training spans three of Brazil's leading management schools and one US institution: MBA from the University of São Paulo (USP), MSc from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and PhD from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), with a research period at Florida International University (FIU). That trajectory — between frontier theory and executive practice — is what gave rise to SMX.
Over the last decade, he has dedicated himself to translating classic strategy, operations, marketing, finance, and leadership cases into decisional experiences — where the reader stops being a spectator and becomes the protagonist.
This blog is SMX's public lab. Each article is a long-form breakdown of a real business case — the kind of reading typically locked behind business school paywalls. The goals are simple:
Corporate strategy, operating models, financial inclusion, digital transformation in emerging markets, case-method pedagogy — and the perennial tension between theory and the Wednesday-afternoon spreadsheet.
For press, partnerships, speaking engagements, or guest-author invitations, reach out on LinkedIn.
The full story of M-Pesa and the four strategic decisions that turned Safaricom into the biggest financial-inclusion case study ever built. Over half of Kenya's GDP flows through it.
How Rocky Aoki turned a space problem into a margin machine: smaller kitchen, shorter menu, more theater. The anatomy of the operating model that became a Harvard case in 1972.