José Tomás (JT) Arenas took time out from his career as a logistics strategist for Falabella, a multinational chain of department stores in his native Chile, to enroll in the MSx program at Stanford GSB. His wife and their two children also joined him in Palo Alto.
“I’m trying to do more and give more,” says Arenas, a former rugby player and competitive track and field athlete. “I was doing well and growing in my career, but I wanted to be at the frontier of excellence.” Arenas says his search for that frontier led him to Stanford GSB.
“You always look at pioneer models at other companies and see how things are being done elsewhere. I’m convinced that coming to Silicon Valley, with the biggest companies and brightest minds, was the best way to see the very best practices and trends in technology.”
Falabella is a big company with different businesses — including a bank, home improvement, and retail stores — with a presence in the whole region. I was in strategy for home delivery and third-party sellers, which is a business unit responsible for last-mile logistics for package delivery. I also built the company’s multichannel logistics and revenue management departments, both of which became highly successful growth drivers.
The more I advanced in my tech career, the more I realized the importance of leadership skills. I had strong technical skills, but I wanted to prepare myself for working with executives and on boards of companies. I wanted to learn more about team dynamics and effective communication strategies. I knew that the MSx program could help me translate what I learned in the classroom to the real world.
During my career, I’ve always tried to find non-intuitive connections between how different industries do things. I mixed AI and medicine 15 years ago and brought all that knowledge to logistics to find innovation. Supply chain was my latest role, but it’s just one example of where you can be creative. You have all these stakeholders, bigger companies, smaller companies, internal frictions, and those constituents make it complicated to find common ground. I enjoy using creative thinking and complex concepts to solve supply chain problems.
It’s important for leaders to have vision, discipline, and empathy. These are all skills I’m honing at the GSB.
Managing Growing Enterprises. The course teaches you how to deal with the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in a rapidly growing company. It also helped me think about how to balance my personal business intuition with established frameworks and make the best decisions. I found the course fascinating.
I’m involved in the Latin American Student Association and enjoy the opportunity to connect with other students who share the same interests and experiences. That’s one of my highlights outside of the classroom.
I competed in track and field, and rugby. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I gained valuable leadership skills playing sports: discipline, perseverance, and an appreciation for the value of teamwork. Sports helped make me the leader I am today.
We have two kids — a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. My wife and I are excited for them to experience everything the United States and the Bay Area has to offer. They are learning how to live in a new culture, and that has given me a lot of pride. The quality of life at the GSB is far greater than what I could have imagined for my family and me, and that has been a wonderful surprise.
Photos by Elena Zhukova
José Tomás Arenas – Stanford Graduate School of Business
