Brasil Telecom's cultural iconoclast: career path less traveled. (CEO Watch).

You think you have cultural issues? Consider the career of Carla Cico, president and CEO of Brasil Telecom since February 2001.

She's responsible for helping the $3.2 billion telecommunications company adapt to sweeping government-led changes in Brazil's telecom sector, which dissolved, and sold off, its state monopolies in late 1999.

The 18-month privatization process relicensed 26 cellular lines, 27 fixed lines and one long-distance company. Simultaneously, it created a regulatory agency to ensure that all customers have access to affordable service, many for the first time.

"Before privatization, telephone service in Brazil was a luxury, like a Louis Vuitton bag," explains Cico. "Now it's available to everybody."

Brazil's third-largest telecommunications provider was cobbled together from 10 of the formerly state-owned operators. It markets to three regions of Brazil, from the sophisticated and independent gauchos of Rio Grande Do Sul, to the agrarian farmers of Mato Grosso. Cico, the first female CEO in Brazil's telecom industry, is a 41-year-old single globetrotter born in Verona, Italy. Educated in London and trained in Beijing, she speaks five languages, including Portuguese and Chinese.

In October, Cico took steps to accommodate BT's disparate markets by centralizing management under the headquarters in Brasilia. The move is intended to alleviate regional differences between far-flung business units and the parent company by relocating regional managers in Brasilia. "You must make people feel involved," says Cico.

Cico discovered early in her farranging, 15-year career that adaptability is the one truly transferrable skill. She recounts learning that lesson when she went to work in China for a telecom equipment supplier and found none of the comforts she was accustomed to, like heat in winter and air conditioning in summer.

"Either you adapt, or you pack up and go back to a more comfortable life," says Cico.

The challenge now facing Cico is to market to lower-income customers with whom BT never did business before--for good reason. "They tend to [incur] bad debt regardless of a recession," says Cico. In each of the last two quarters of 2001, customer debt was about 3.2 percent of BT's gross revenues. Regulations require operators to provide service to even the poorest, most remote Indian reservation.