"Businesses require to re-examine the use of new technologies and how to transform business models through them"
Meet Jorge Mejia – a 44-year-old Colombian-born educator and entrepreneur with a passion for mathematical modeling. He likes to think that he has a talent when recruiting people that work well together in teams. His bachelor’s degree is in Finance and International relations and he has two Master’s degrees, one in applied finance and one in Bussines Operations Management.
Jorge has been involved with academic work in Colombia, USA, and Australia, and he has also been an entrepreneur in Colombia, Australia, and now the USA. Currently, all his attention is on MAIA HEALTH, the sole digital ecosystem for smart disease management for cancer.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Jorge Mejia: I am 44 years old Colombian-born educator and entrepreneur with a passion for mathematical modeling. I like to think that I have a talent when recruiting people that work well together in teams. I have been involved with academic work in Colombia, USA, and Australia, and I have also been an entrepreneur in Colombia, the USA, and Australia. Currently, all my attention is on MAIA HEALTH, the sole digital ecosystem for smart disease management for cancer. We want to defeat cancer through information. Beating cancer is not curing it, at least at this moment in our civilization. Beating cancer means turning a deadly disease into a chronic illness that allows the patient to live with a good quality of life.
We can connect and coach patients, doctors, and institutions through the best possible sourcing and integration of curated information. To consistently improve the patient’s treatment and generate performance-based medicine for MDs and Institutions.
MAIA is also very good for pharmaceutical trials in gene therapy, getting the patients to be part of trials, and doing the follow-up, we integrated proactive and traditional pharmacovigilance so that we could deliver the best possible data on outcomes.
2020 and 2021 threw a lot of curve balls into business on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past couple years, how can businesses thrive in 2022? What lessons have you learned?
Jorge Mejia: MAIA (our company) was born during these challenging times. Our lessons learned for resilience are teamwork, teamwork, and teamwork. Putting egos aside is vital and creating the stairway to your dreams using strategic thinking.
The pandemic seems to keep on disrupting the economy, what should businesses focus on in 2022? What advice would you share?
Jorge Mejia: Businesses require to re-examine the use of new technologies and how to transform business models through them
How has the pandemic changed your industry and how have you adapted?
Jorge Mejia: Being a health tech, you’d think that changes are enormous and significant, but it is needed to understand evolution and change. But medical practitioners are resistant to change, even though technology has demonstrated how important it is to add value to this sector. Of course, they need to protect the patients, but so are many technologies such as MAIA.
What advice do you wish you received when the pandemic started and what do you intend on improving in 2022?
Jorge Mejia: Be more ambitious, dream big. When we dared to dream, we changed the company’s fate, and we took a long time to take that step forward.
Online business surged higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for 2022?
Jorge Mejia: New technologies come, and they sort of pop into the culture, like Distributed Ledger Technologies, and they are fantastic, but we need to let them mature. Those are my expectations for 2022, better and more mature technological approaches to tech, such as digital health, for instance
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a screen?
Jorge Mejia: Wow, anywhere from 8 to 10
The majority of executives use stories to persuade and communicate in the workplace. Can you share with our readers examples of how you implement that in your business to communicate effectively with your team?
Jorge Mejia: Storytelling is a feature of human civilization, and our lives are stories in the writing. I like this story about an experiment in which they took a group of bonobos and put them into an enclosed environment, and they put a set of steps on of them, bananas. When the first bonobo tried to get the bananas, the scientist whose the rest of the group, so whenever a bonobo tried to go for the fruit, the rest of the group was whose, hence they started to punish the want that went up.
Then the scientists started to take one member from that original group and bring a new bonobo to the group; this new one, of course, fell for the lure of the fruit, and whenever he tried to reach the steps, he was punished. Those scientists stopped using the whose, and one by one, the bonobos from the original group were changed, yet they kept punishing the ones that tried to reach the steps leading to the fruit. However, non of those bonobos faced the whose. This is how culture works; we need to reexamine our beliefs, we need to question what we do so we are able to transform and evolve.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Jorge Mejia: Individuals are always challenging, specifically those within the organization that can damage the company’s culture and values.
Other obstacles come from the business environment itself, how adopting these new technologies is a cultural effort, how we can affect changing culture.
In 2022, what are you most interested in learning about? Crypto, NFTs, online marketing, or any other skill sets? Please share your motivations.
Jorge Mejia: Marketing, online marketing is the key for 2022. We are landing our company in the US, so we need to understand our clients and reach out to them and how to understand this new reality from the marketing perspective. NFT, DLT are great technologies, but I think they to mature. They are indeed the future; what is happening is that we are experiencing the feverish part of the revolution, important but not the key to it.
A record 4.4 million Americans left their jobs in September in 2021, accelerating a trend that has become known as the Great Resignation. 47% of people plan to leave their job during 2022. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. Do you think leaders see the data and think “that’s not me – I’m not that boss they don’t want to work for? What changes do you think need to happen?
Jorge Mejia: Well, I go back to the company culture; it is not THE boss, is the culture ruling your company? Is there a culture of good leadership in place? Is there a culture that understands the dynamics of the current workforce? Then a company may have a better retention rate. But, America is facing a different dynamic with the workforce, and part of these changes relates to a willingness of the population to stop working until they may find something that fulfills expectations other than a mere professional career.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Jorge Mejia: Social impact, extreme social impact
What does “success” in 2022 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Jorge Mejia: Peace, I think that we cannot be blind to what is happening to Ukraine.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jorge Mejia for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Jorge Mejia or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
