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For more than four decades, Luiz Oliveira built a remarkable career at Linde, a global industrial gases and engineering company that saw sales of approximately $33 billion in 2023.
“Every three to four years, I was doing a different job, so it kept things interesting,” he says. “For instance, I was the business vice president for the US Central region, had global jobs such as operations excellence, CIO, and CPO, and also ran business in Brazil and South America countries.”
Oliveira’s time at Linde included a key role in the highly successful merger of Praxair and Linde. The merger created a company with a market cap of more than $200 billion. “There were a lot of challenges to bring things together, but it also created a sense of teamwork and collaboration across the whole corporation,” he recalls.
“Luiz Oliveira’s leadership at Linde exemplifies transformation and innovation,” says Megan Buntain, chief marketing and strategy officer at Seeq. “By leveraging Seeq’s operational intelligence platform during the Praxair merger, he empowered Linde’s experts, aligning operational strategy with enterprise goals, driving operational excellence and profitability. His vision continues to inspire all of use working at the crossroads of strategy and innovation.”
After the merger, “I was doing global jobs for about eight years, traveling 50 percent of my time,” Oliveira says. Eventually, “I wanted to spend more time with my family and also try something different outside of the industrial gases market.”
That’s why Oliveira decided to leave his most recent role as the head of Linde’s global center of excellence. He worked out an agreement to retire from Linde in September 2024. But “retirement” doesn’t mean he’s taking it easy. It hasn’t taken long for offers to roll in.
One such offer came from GranBio, a Brazilian biotechnology leader focused on developing and commercializing sustainable solutions for biofuels and bioproducts. Granbio offers range from cutting-edge, integrated solutions for the oil and gas sector to advanced biofuels and other groundbreaking technologies that support the transition to a low-carbon future. Oliveira joined the company’s board and is actively supporting GranBio’s growth in the US and globally.
But that’s not all. Oliveira also decided to start his own global consulting firm, Next Level Business Consulting, to help businesses design and execute operations excellence strategies. While he can’t reveal specifics yet, he is excited about what’s ahead.
“It gives me the ability to do something I am familiar with along with something new and challenging, but with a tremendous growth potential,” he says. “It pushes me outside of my comfort zone, but that’s where we find the most interesting opportunities to learn and grow.”
Joining him on this new endeavor is his wife, Claudia. With their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Fernanda, studying at Fordham Law School, and Luiza, their younger daughter, about to graduate from high school, the Oliveiras plan to move from their long-time home in Chicago to Miami next summer.
“My plan was always to take six months and enjoy life, travel with my wife, but a week after I announced I was leaving, things started happening,” he shares. “I postponed this relaxing time a bit, and I’m now super busy but very much motivated with the new challenges ahead of me.”
This shift from planning a restful hiatus to diving headfirst into new opportunities reflects the same drive and adaptability that Oliveira has demonstrated throughout his career. Oliveira started at Linde as an intern after completing his studies in Brazil. In his first full-time role there at a manufacturing facility, he improved productivity by 40 percent.
“When you combine passion with talent, Latinos can differentiate themselves.”
Luiz Oliveira
“That was when I realized I enjoyed leading people and making decisions to help transform the way things are done,” Oliveira recalls. “What always drove everything for me was my ability to innovate and make a difference. I was always focused on results, strategy, and execution.”
Over the years, Oliveira took on positions in engineering, marketing, sales, and operations, gaining a broad perspective on all facets of the business. One of the proudest accomplishments of his career was his work on the Praxair–Linde merger.
“When I saw the size of the challenge ahead for the company leaders and employees, my initial reaction was, ‘It’s going to be a hard job,’” he recalls. “I could see a big difference in the way the different entities involved used to manage their business and operations across multiple countries globally.
“What I never imagined was the way both companies embraced the challenge and worked together to create the biggest and most profitable industrial gases and engineering company in the world. We all worked together and came up with a way to make the impossible possible.”
Oliveira’s global operations excellence team was responsible for combining the best practices from both companies. They put the best minds together from both organizations and created a constructive working environment with full support from leadership across the globe. In the end, the company embraced and executed on best practices from multiple countries across the globe, contributing to the merger’s success.
“I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work on so many different areas during my career,” he says. “I believe when you combine knowledge with passion and drive for results, it always makes a big difference.”
As he transitions from his corporate role, Oliveira looks forward to spending more time with his family. “We like to travel and play pickleball and tennis. I’m very close with my daughters, and I love to spend quality time with them,” he says.
For Latinos looking to follow in his footsteps, Oliveira advises them to work hard and show what’s inside them.
“There’s a passion in us—the ability to do something with more energy than the average in other cultures,” he says. “When you combine passion with talent, Latinos can differentiate themselves.”
That combination of passion, talent, and drive has served Oliveira well throughout his forty-year career, and it will undoubtedly shape his next chapter.
