Tiberiu Moisă, Deputy CEO SME & MidCorporate, Banca Transilvania, took part in the Best Managed Companies Romania Gala, an event organised by Deloitte under the Deloitte Private umbrella that each year brings to the fore leadership, strategy and governance lessons from Romanian entrepreneurship.

At the gala, Deloitte awarded the Best Managed Companies certification, a distinction granted in line with an international methodology that assesses four pillars: strategy; resources and innovation; culture and commitment; and governance and financial aspects. 

We’re revisiting a few of the premises with which we started this edition a few months ago.
 

ON ADAPTABILITY 

• Adaptability is a word used all the time — we’ve all overused it. We thought we’d be done with it in 2020, but we had to use it in 2021 and 2022 as well, and since then every year we keep talking about adaptation. People do adapt — we see it — probably according to their circumstances, experience and individual capabilities. We tend to think of 2020 as the year when it all started, but it was a succession of years that forced us all through a school we didn’t choose but was very real: the school of adaptability.
  
  
• Strategy generally means having a throughline — one that tackles critical issues while at the same time seeking potential for development and growth — and over these years it has become more flexible. You can’t adapt to a constantly changing environment, to shocks that arise and can’t be anticipated, unless you have the ability to pivot, to adjust your throughline so it fits your own context. In that sense, adaptation is the order of the day. 
  
  
• Adaptation by itself isn’t enough; it helps you survive, but it doesn’t necessarily drive development. We’re looking for more: we still need to grow, and we need capital. We probably also need more courage, including when we try to internationalise our businesses.
  
  
• In these conditions, where everything is changing, entrepreneurs probably find it difficult to make long-term plans; yet it’s also from entrepreneurs that optimism comes, and optimism brings confidence. In our view, optimism and confidence are the most valuable lessons. Alongside them, we’re trying to develop all the other elements that relate to resource management, discipline and a balanced way of making decisions.
   

CRITICAL COMPONENTS 

• What really matters is understanding how companies are prepared — and why some are better prepared than others. You then see adaptation and balance again, and a certain way of making decisions and relating to what is new. Ultimately, you always come back to people and their capabilities, and for me capabilities are the key to everything we see around us, whether in the public sector or the private sector. 
  
  
• Everything depends on the capabilities of the people who make decisions. And these capabilities don’t appear overnight; they come from education in all its forms. You can’t do without competent people; it’s not enough to have dedicated people with energy and a good attitude — you need competent people. From our point of view, you only succeed in moving forward when you take this into account. One of the structural issues we need to improve or fix in Romanian society has to do with the capabilities of the people who make decisions.  
  
  
• At the same time, we believe the financing tools available to Romanian businesses need to develop and go well beyond traditional bank financing. All types of instruments related to capital — everything that drives capital accumulation — and by capital we mean not only what comes from outside, but also the way companies capitalise their own business — address, in fact, a structural weakness of our economy. 
  
  
• These are the two levers, beyond bank financing, that could be a powerful growth driver: capabilities and better access to how capital is accumulated. To me, these two components are critical to anything we want to build next. 

These are just a few of the ideas drawn from the Best Managed Companies Romania programme experience. For the full picture, we invite you to read the press release to see the programme’s impact across the Romanian economy.