I live between São Paulo, the mountains and the Amazon region, and the question visitors ask me most often is how the city works at all. Twelve million people inside the municipal line, twenty-odd million in the metropolitan region, traffic that turns a ten-kilometre meeting into a two-hour decision, and a civic machinery nobody would design on purpose. Yet things get built, deals close, and a company started in a flat in Pinheiros can be serving the whole country within three years.
My answer, after some years of thinking about it, is that São Paulo does not work the way a city is supposed to. It works the way a complex system works, and the people who do well here have picked up, mostly without naming them, a set of habits for operating inside complexity. I think those habits are the city's most useful export, more useful than any sector report, because they travel to almost any international project that has to survive contact with reality.
Three of them matter most to me.
The first is redundancy in relationships. In a city this size every path to a decision has more than one route, and the first route is usually blocked. The official channel is on holiday. The person on the org chart left in March. The partner who signed the letter of intent got reassigned. Paulistanos do not treat this as a crisis because they never relied on a single thread in the first place. They know three people who can reach the same place and they have kept all three warm without needing any of them. Visitors read this as a culture of favours. I read it as a culture built for a place where any single node can fail at any moment, and often does.
For an international project this is an uncomfortable lesson because it looks like waste. A plan that depends on one local partner, one regulatory contact, one distribution agreement, is a plan with no redundancy, and here it will fail, not through anyone's bad faith but because someone, somewhere, will simply not be there on the day. We build client plans with at least two live routes to every outcome that matters, and we treat the second route as part of the cost of entry rather than as insurance.
The second habit is tolerance for partial information. Nobody in São Paulo has the full picture; the city is too large and too informally run for anyone to hold it. The people who get things done have made peace with acting on sixty percent and correcting as they go. That sounds reckless. What it is, in the good operators, is a trained sense of which forty percent can stay unknown and which three facts must be nailed down before you move. A good operator here knows the venue's capacity can be approximate but the name of the person who controls the calendar cannot.
Teams arriving from more legible places tend to do the reverse. They wait for the complete data set, which never arrives, and then act on a plan in which every fact weighs the same. We grade everything instead: confirmed, estimated, assumed, hypothesised. Grading does not reduce the uncertainty. It tells you where to spend the next phone call, and it lets a plan move while it is still incomplete, which in this city is the only way a plan ever moves.
The third habit is speed when the window opens. Carlos has written that Brazil is slow until it is suddenly very fast. São Paulo is where that pattern is most extreme. Months of nothing, then a budget gets released or a counterpart changes or an event lands on the calendar, and the whole opportunity has to be executed in three weeks. The teams that win are not the fastest in general. They spent the slow months preparing everything that could be prepared, so that when the window opened the only work left was the work that could not have been done earlier.
I learned this by building projects rather than advising on them, and it changed how I write a plan. The slow phase is pre-assembly: contracts drafted and parked, suppliers found and briefed, every decision that can be taken in advance taken in advance, so that the fast phase eats execution capacity and not thinking capacity. A plan that treats the slow and fast phases as one tempo will be late in the fast one every time.
There is a fourth habit underneath the other three that I find harder to teach. People here hold plans lightly and relationships firmly. They expect the plan to change. They expect the relationships to hold, and the relationships are what carry a project through the stretch when the plan has stopped describing reality. Outsiders often arrive with the opposite instinct, defending the plan and treating relationships as instrumental, and then they are surprised when the plan survives and the project does not.
None of this belongs to São Paulo alone. Lagos, Jakarta and Mexico City would recognise all of it. What São Paulo offers is a very large, very commercial laboratory where you learn these habits fast, because the city punishes their absence in weeks rather than years. If you can run a project here you can run one most places. The reverse is not true, and that asymmetry is a large part of why a firm like ours exists.