Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does
With a career that has taken him from a business development analyst to President of one of the fastest-growing regions in aesthetic medicine, Can Gumus knows there is no single playbook for stepping into a new leadership position.
Having held roles across 4 countries, in a variety of contexts, he became General Manager at 31, in a country where he didn’t speak the language and in a business at a critical turning point. What prepared him, he says, is a handful of hard-won convictions, about timing, people, and what happens when you stop trying to prove yourself.
The Opening Gambit is a new series by Altiplano Partners exploring the first 100 days of new leadership. In this series, we go behind the scenes of the first 100 days to the real experiences, the mistakes that became lessons and the ways different ways leaders start shifting a system from the moment they arrive.
Heart attack or panic attack?
Can Gumus doesn’t believe in a universal first-100-day plan. He believes in reading the room and doing it fast.
“The usual protocol is to meet a lot of people, ask a lot of questions, don’t take any big decisions, seek to understand before being understood, take your first three months to really assess. That’s the standard playbook,” he says. “But context matters. What is the situation you’re inheriting?”
He draws a medical analogy that resonated long after the conversation.
“If a patient comes in bleeding profusely, you don’t care if a rib is broken, you stabilize the patient regardless. You have to be aggressive, you have to be quick. But if a patient comes in with chest pain, they might not necessarily be having a heart attack, but it is one of the options you have to consider. If this is the starting point then you have the time to take the assessment, to run the needed tests.”
The same is true in leadership. When Can moved to Latin America, the business was thriving. His predecessor hadn’t left in crisis, the numbers were good. “So I could really practice what I said: take the time, build the relationships. Sometimes that’s actually harder, because there’s nothing obviously wrong.”
But when he arrived in France, as a first-time General Manager who didn’t speak a word of French, in a business that was under significant pressure, the tempo was radically different. “You don’t have three months when people are looking at you and expecting you to act every day. Then you have to take some big decisions.”
The diagnostic determines the tempo. Not the calendar.
The worst advice: “Go prove yourself.”
I asked Can for the worst possible advice you could give a first-time CEO or General Manager. His answer came without hesitation.
“Prove yourself. That’s the worst advice you can give someone.”
Why? Because it plays to exactly the wrong instinct.
“Managers make mistakes because they try to prove themselves when they get the job. Instead, what they have to realize is: they got the job. Somebody who knows, has more experience than them, saw something in them and gave them the job.”
When you tell someone to go prove themselves, Can argues, you’re triggering an emotional, ego-driven mode of operating, not a thoughtful, methodical one.
“One of the best pieces of advice I give and get is, don’t try to be a hero year one. Don’t do that, because sometimes you’ll pay for it for the rest of the five years you’re there.”
He’s precise about the mechanism. Who gets promoted? Hungry, ambitious, intellectually capable people. The ones who have a natural tendency to please, to show off. And so “don’t be a hero” is really about neutralizing that reflex. “Relax. You got the job. Now do the job.”
The goal in the first year shouldn’t be to do great. It should be to do what is expected, and do it well.
People decisions: the slow leak
If there’s one pattern Can sees again and again, in first-time GMs: people decisions take too long.
“I usually find them, the first-time GMs, pretty good about business matters. But on people matters, I see decisions that take too long to take.”
The reason is human, of course. “You want to help the person, you try to coach them. In most healthy company’s the culture focuses on helping people grow and get better. And of course there’s a lot you can do. But sometimes, despite the support, the fit or the timing is not right. And when that becomes clear, leaders need to act with clarity, fairness, and respect, without letting uncertainty linger for too long.
He’s candid about his own blind spots. “I was very hesitant about people decisions early on. Looking back, there are leadership decisions I would navigate differently today”
Looking back across his transitions, he recognizes a recurring pattern: the signals were there from the start, a person who wasn’t right, a dynamic that wasn’t working, but the rational mind found reasons to wait. To give it more time. To hope it would resolve itself. It rarely did.
What he’s learned, and keeps relearning, is to trust your gut, even when the rational mind resists it.
“It’s like your body knows, but your mind doesn’t. Sometimes your gut knows it before your head accepts it.”
Everybody’s good at poker when the stakes are low
Can extends this to a broader insight about character and pressure.
“I recently listened to a podcast about high-stakes poker. He was saying how he loves to play where it’s real money, a lot of it, because everybody’s good at poker when we’re playing with five dollars. When a hundred thousand or a million is at the table, you start to get very anxious. Then you really start showing on your face and your body.”
There’s a humbling corollary to this, and it hits every first-time GM at some point. Before you carry the weight of a decision, before it’s your name on the outcome, your team’s jobs at stake, your credibility on the line, it’s remarkably easy to have strong opinions about what should be done. Everyone has a view from the sideline. But the moment you’re the one who has to decide, absorb the consequences, and live with the result, the game changes entirely. That shift, from commentator to player, is one of the most underestimated transitions in leadership. And it teaches something no playbook can: humility.
The client circle: a moment of truth
When Can arrived in France to a demoralized, siloed organization, the first thing he did was a very simple re-alignment. He drew a circle.
There’s a pattern he’d seen before, and has seen since, in organizations under stress: the worse things get, the more the company turns inward. Teams start protecting their turf. Energy goes into internal politics, blame loops, and firefighting. And in the process, the one thing that actually generates revenue, the customer, quietly disappears from the conversation. It becomes a vicious circle: the less you focus on the client, the worse the results; the worse the results, the more you retreat inward.
Can’s instinct was to break that cycle at the root.
“I put the customer in the center. I said: this is why we exist. None of us get paid, none of us succeed, there’s no regulatory department or finance department without this customer.”
Then a second circle around it, the sales team, who interact directly with the customer. Then marketing, which supports sales. And only then, in the outer ring: finance, regulatory, HR, legal, compliance.
“I said: All of us support these people in the middle. It’s not the other way around. The role of finance/regulatory and legal is to help marketing succeed. Marketing’s job is to help the sales rep succeed. The sales rep’s job is to help the customer succeed. And if that whole chain works, we’ll be fine.”
That simple alignment, not a 50-slide strategy deck, but a drawing on a board, was the beginning of a turnaround that doubled revenues and tripled profitability in four years.
“Success is the ultimate driver of culture. It gives confidence to everyone to open up, bring their best-selves to work and most importantly to come back to do it again and again.”
The trap of success
But Can is equally clear-eyed about success’s downside.
“Past success can also be a trap. It makes you think that it’s always going to be that way. It triggers the availability bias, if it worked once, it should work again.”
The availability bias is that cognitive shortcut where our brain over emphasises what’s most recent or most vivid in our experience and treats it as the rule rather than the exception.
He experienced it himself. A bold decision that worked brilliantly in the US didn’t translate when he tried something similar in Latin America. The context was different. The playbook didn’t transfer.
“You are going to build up a conviction or belief based on one success that is not at all applicable in your next experience.”
And the inverse is also true: just because something failed once doesn’t mean it can’t work somewhere else. The discipline is to remain context-sensitive, every time.
Cultural identity: the merge of both
Having lived in Turkey, France, the United States, and now Brazil, Can gets asked constantly about cultural adaptation. His answer is nuanced.
“There is something really important about intercultural awareness and adapting to the culture you arrive in. At the same time, there are qualities, values, and experiences that have contributed to your success, and those shouldn’t be lost along the way.”
He doesn’t believe cultural adaptation requires abandoning your own identity.
“I’m Turkish and American, but when it comes to business, I’m American, and there are certain biases of that I don’t try to hide. Of course I connect with my team the Latin way and understand their differences.
The goal isn’t to become someone else, but to bring your authentic self while remaining open to learning from others.
It’s about finding the right balance between staying true to who you are and embracing the perspectives, values, and strengths of the new environment around you.
Rating the first 100 days
At the end of our conversation, I asked Can to rate the real importance of the first 100 days on a scale from one to ten.
His answer was the most memorable line of the interview:
“If you do it right, it’s a six. If you do it wrong, it’s a ten.”
In other words: the first 100 days won’t make your legacy, but they can break it. The bigger risk isn’t missing an opportunity. It’s making a costly mistake you’ll spend years undoing.
“If you don’t make a mistake, it’s not that important. You can change. You can correct. You can build on it. Nobody’s going to fire you after 90 days.”
But come in with preconceptions, ignore the people, create unnecessary turnover? Then you can sink the ship.
He adds one important caveat: his entire career has been within the same company. That means he’s always had organizational credibility, institutional knowledge, and goodwill to draw on. For someone arriving from the outside, with no track record and no network, the first 100 days carry more weight.
“If the vast majority of the people don’t know who you are, your first 90 days is more important than if you’re moving in-line within a company.”
What stays
What I take from this conversation is not a method. It’s a posture.
Can Gumus doesn’t arrive with answers. He arrives with a diagnostic reflex, a bias toward learning the why to defeat the default mode, and a willingness to trust what his gut is telling him about people, even when his rational mind would rather wait for more data.
He’s not afraid of boldness, but he’s deeply wary of heroism. He knows that empathy, the very quality that makes a leader worth following, can also become the reason you delay a hard call too long, not out of weakness, but out of care. The tension between the two never fully resolves; it just gets easier to recognize. And he carries a sentence that could serve as a compass for any leader stepping into a new role: your body knows before your mind does.
The question is whether you’ll listen.
The Opening Gambit is a series by Altiplano Partners. Every leader has a personal way of stepping into a new role. A first move. A unique tempo. A handful of early convictions. We go behind the scenes of the first 100 days to the real experiences, the mistakes that became lessons and the ways different ways leaders start shifting a system from the moment they arrive.
Can Gumus is President of Merz Aesthetics Latin America, responsible for operations across four affiliates and more than ten distribution markets. General Manager for the first time at 31, he has since held leadership positions across four continents — building commercial turnarounds, scaling marketing organizations, and leading P&Ls from France to the United States to Brazil. A global citizen shaped by Turkey, France, America, and São Paulo, he has spent nearly two decades within Merz, rising from business development to regional president. His motto: “Enjoy what you do and be confident.”
Altiplano Partners is a strategic advisory firm that partners with CEOs and executive teams to design and drive transformations — organizational, cultural, and operational. From restructuring a leadership team to redefining how a company creates value, Altiplano works at the intersection of strategy and leadership, where the hardest decisions live. The Opening Gambit is one expression of that mission: capturing the real stories behind the moments that shape — and sometimes redefine — a leader’s trajectory.
