Ipanema: change that runs itself
What Ipanema runs without us today
The measure of six years is not what we facilitated. It is what the company now runs on its own.
Ipanema's People and Management area runs its own architecture: performance cycles built on leadership behaviours, succession mapping, climate surveys with per-area action plans, redesigned onboarding, and a culture and inclusion programme. We facilitate none of it. The company measures its people, acts on what it finds, and remeasures. Momento Ipanema, a recurring encounter that brings the whole organisation together around strategy, climate, leadership and results, is now a standing corporate practice.
A traditional, family-owned business of 800+ people across five locations and four brands learned to change without losing what it is. This is how.
Company scale, brands and participation figures as reported by Grupo Ipanema Lacteos.
The question underneath six years
How does a company built on tradition learn to change without losing what it is?
When we started in 2020, the challenge was survival: a relationship-driven company suddenly working remotely. The question underneath it carried through every engagement since. The transformation belongs to Ipanema. Our role was to support it where change gets stuck, and to build the capability inside the company so each change would hold without us. Six years did not add up to a programme. They added up to ownership moving one level deeper each time, until the change no longer needed us.
Three transfers of ownership
HR moved from an admin function to a strategic partner. A 2023 workshop defined the leadership behaviours aligned to the company's values, and those behaviours became the criteria in Ipanema's performance evaluation. From 2025, a leadership development programme added behavioural assessments, organisational diagnosis and manager-designed transformation projects. Today the People and Management area runs the full architecture and remeasures itself, with a 2026 climate survey confirming the result and its lowest-scoring item shaping the next leadership agenda. That is change capability, not a change project.
We led the rebrand of the core Ipanema brand with an agency and created a corporate brand carrying the cultural values, relationships from field to table. When founder Carlos Menocci passed away, we designed a month-long, company-wide programme that translated his legacy into observable behaviours: founder stories, weekly reflections, employees sharing their own examples. Not a tribute, a transfer. A year later the 44th anniversary connected every unit at once and presented the new corporate brand as the next chapter of that story.
Momento Ipanema became a standing ritual the company owns. We facilitated the group's first major sales convention in March 2026 against objectives set with leadership beforehand, and the board then moved to institutionalise it as an annual event. Two projects run today, both designed to make us less necessary: AI enablement, where leaders identify real ways to integrate AI into how they work, and train the trainers, where we prepare Ipanema's own people to facilitate leadership development off the back of our Human Technology Assessment. The 2026 cycle starts from that diagnostic and the climate survey, and the experiments leaders run are what the remeasure will test.