By the time Julio Alonso Ortega (Business Management, 2021, Lonsdale) arrived at Lancaster, he had already learned something most people only meet much later: pressure clarifies.

Raised in the Canary Islands, Ortega came to study Business Management as a world champion sailor already used to international competition and high stakes. While at Lancaster, he stayed close to the top of the sport, racing in the Olympic 470 class and later finishing fourth in the under-24 standings at the world championship.

That double life – athlete and student, racecourse and lecture hall – never felt especially strange to him. Both worlds rewarded discipline. Both exposed weak preparation. Both punished drift.

Lancaster gave him something different; not identity, but language. It gave him a way to think about business beyond the obvious: systems, incentives, markets, execution.

In other words, it taught him to read organisations with the same care he once read the water.

Since graduating, Ortega has kept moving toward environments where performance has to be real. He went on to study the Political Economy of Emerging Markets at King’s College London, deepened his engagement with the Middle East and North Africa through Arabic, and is now a partner at Qabas, the Libyan firm he helped rebuild with a fellow Lancaster alumnus.

Today, his work spans strategy, market development and long-term institution building. Qabas represents global names including Microsoft, Siemens, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Bitdefender.

But Ortega’s real interest lies elsewhere: in how serious systems are built, and why so many developing economies are still judged by the wrong metrics. In his view, they do not mainly suffer from a shortage of ideas. More often, they suffer from a shortage of reliable execution.

That is where he believes the real opportunity lies.

Q. What do you remember most about your time at Lancaster?

A. Range. I was studying business while still competing seriously in sailing, so Lancaster forced me to become disciplined with time, energy and standards. It also widened my understanding of business. I stopped seeing it as just companies and transactions, and started seeing systems, incentives and how people behave when the pressure is real.

Q. How much did sailing shape the way you think now?

A. More than anything else. Sailing is a brutal feedback loop. If your timing is wrong, you know immediately. If communication breaks down, you pay for it. There is no room for theatre. That stays with you. It teaches you to stay calm, strip things back to essentials and execute without drama. I think that mindset has been as useful in business as it ever was on the water.

Q. What drew you towards emerging markets and the MENA region?

A. I was drawn to places where there is real room to build. The more time I spent across the Middle East and North Africa, the more I felt the conversation around these markets was often too superficial. People like to talk about disruption, innovation and the next unicorn. But in many cases, what matters far more is whether institutions function, whether systems can be trusted, and whether the basics are being done properly.

Q. In practical terms, what do you mean by “the basics”?

A. Reliable execution. Clear reporting. Stronger systems. Better decision-making. Serious follow-through. A lot of people underestimate how much value is created when simple things are done consistently well. In developing markets, that can be the difference between stagnation and genuine momentum.

Q. What does your work look like now?

A. I am a partner at Qabas, which I helped rebuild alongside another Lancaster graduate. We work where strategy meets the real economy. On one side, that means representing major international names in Libya. On the other, it means the quieter work of building capability, trust and credible pathways for long-term growth. That is the part I find most interesting. Anyone can talk about opportunity, but far fewer people know how to put it into operation.

Q. What advice would you give current students and recent graduates?

A. Do not confuse intelligence with hesitation. Most capable people already know enough to begin, but they lose time trying to engineer certainty. Move. Test your judgement in the real world. Build a reputation for being fast, reliable and useful. Careers tend to turn not on who sounded impressive, but on who made themselves impossible to ignore.