Episode 12 · leadership-performance
Leading through uncertainty: Matteo Mantovani on McKinsey, entrepreneurship in Iraq and La Liga
A career spanning consulting, co-founding a ride-hailing company in Iraq and sports management with La Liga, on why cultural adaptability and people-first leadership are the only constants.
14 July 2025 · Hosted by Oliver Helvin
Highlights
Why this episode matters
Matteo Mantovani co-founded a ride-hailing company in Iraq, one of the most complex business environments in the world, then moved into sports management with La Liga. His career is a case study in how cultural adaptability, curiosity and a people-first approach work in environments where the conventional playbook does not apply. The lessons are more transferable than the contexts suggest.
Key themes
Understand the environment before you act
Matteo's first principle in any new operating environment is to understand it before acting in it. In Iraq, this was not optional; the cost of misreading the context was existential for the business. He talks about what understanding actually looked like in practice, the specific things that surprised him despite thorough preparation, and how he has applied the same discipline in every subsequent context including La Liga.
Curiosity as a leadership operating system
Matteo describes curiosity not as a personality trait but as a discipline he has deliberately cultivated across a career that has spanned engineering, entrepreneurship and sports management. He talks about how curiosity has been the connective tissue across very different sectors, what it looks like as a daily practice rather than a general attitude, and how he hires for it when building teams.
Acknowledge mistakes early
Matteo is direct that the highest-cost errors in his career have not been the mistakes themselves but the delay in acknowledging them. In a frontier market like Iraq, the environment does not tolerate slow error recovery. He talks about specific moments where early acknowledgement changed the outcome, what made it hard to act on that principle under pressure, and why he now treats early and public acknowledgement as a team culture requirement rather than a personal practice.
Hard markets need relationship work that easy markets allow you to skip
Matteo operated in Iraq and in the sports industry in the Middle East, two environments where the relationship layer is not optional and not fast. His observation is that the discipline this forced on him exposed a gap in how most Western-trained operators approach business development: they rely on systems and processes that assume a functioning market context, and when that context is absent, they have no fallback. He talks about what the relationship-first operating model actually requires and where it travels.
Understanding the environment before you act is not caution. It is the most competitive thing you can do.
Takeaways
- Understand the environment before you act; context is the operating system for every decision
- Curiosity is a leadership operating system, not a personality trait; cultivate it deliberately
- Acknowledge mistakes early and publicly; the cover-up cost is always higher than the mistake cost
- Hard markets require relationship work that easy markets make easy to skip
- The jump from engineering to entrepreneurship to sports management is a template for sector-agnostic leadership
About Matteo Mantovani
Matteo Mantovani
Executive Director, La Liga (former)
Middle East
Matteo Mantovani has built an extraordinary career across engineering, project management, entrepreneurship and sports management. A chemical engineer by training, he co-founded a ride-hailing company in Iraq, navigating the country's complex business landscape before transitioning into sports management as Executive Director at La Liga, where he led the promotion of football in Iraq. His career is defined by cultural adaptability, resilience and a people-first approach to leadership.
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