Perceptiveness - Ortega

Perceptiveness has been identified as an instrumental leadership trait, and described as the ability to adapt to various needs and behaviors of organizational stakeholders impacted by internal and external influences. Perceptiveness has been described as an ability to acclimate to various requirements for different stakeholders, internal and external to the organization Small business environments adapt and innovate based on the autonomy and individual knowledge provided by the leaders as well as influential stakeholders including employees. Analysis and evaluation of perceptiveness of leaders in small business environments involves a transformative insight into sustainable growth.

For an example, let’s take Ortega. Ortega founded the Inditex Group in 1963, which owns Zara and other men’s and women’s retail apparel, footwear and home textiles businesses. He opened the first Zara store in A Coruña in 1975, shaking up the retail fashion industry by dramatically speeding up turnaround schedules so that clothes go from idea to the sales floor in two weeks. Zara’s fashions are based on runway attire but sold at prices the average person can afford. Inditex Group designs, manufactures, distributes and sells its own products in more than 6,000 stores around the world. The company went public in 2001. In 2011, he stepped down as Inditex’s chairman, but he retains ownership of 60% of its shares as of 2014. He also has significant real estate holdings, including the tallest building in Madrid – the Torre Picasso – and properties in high-end areas of London, New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona.

A self-made multibillionaire with an estimated net worth of $65.4 billion in 2014, according to Forbes, Ortega is one of the wealthiest people in the world alongside Carlos Slim Helú, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Despite his fortune, Ortega is known as a man of habit and modest attire and is famously private, avoiding interviews with journalists. He lives in A Coruña, the same small town in Galicia, Spain, where he first opened Zara. Ortega and his first wife, Mera, divorced in 1997. Ortega remarried to Flora Perez Marcote in 2003, with whom he had fathered another child in 1983. When his first wife passed away in 2013, their daughter, Sandra Ortega Mera, inherited 90% of her mother’s wealth, becoming Inditex’s second-largest shareholder and the richest woman in Spain.