Photo by Alice Sassu

It would be a much sexier story, says Jorge Perez de Leza (MBA 1996), if he told people he was trampled by a raging bull, but the truth is that the fall that had such a profound effect on his life was a much more mundane event.

"It was just a really stupid accident," says Perez de Leza, who actually was in Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. "I slipped. I had climbed to the top of a tall wall, and I just plummeted and hit my head."

Perez de Leza was 25 at the time, a native of Madrid taking an extended summer vacation before starting HBS in the fall of 1993. But when he woke up in the hospital, his doctors told him there would be no trip to Massachusetts, only long months of rehab and preparing for a life without the use of his legs. Yet it was also the beginning of a successful dual career as an executive and a dedicated advocate for people with disabilities.

"When you hear somebody say that in one minute your life changes—it can happen," says Perez de Leza, who is now CEO of Metrovacesa, one of Spain's oldest and largest real estate developers. "There's never a good time, but I think 25 was a good age. Harvard was still in front of me."

Perez de Leza reapplied and started HBS in fall 1994. Coming from an engineering background, he found the School's approach of building broad general management and leadership skills a bit foreign at first but has come to rely on those practices over the years. "I specialize in nothing, but I think I can do pretty much anything," he says of his HBS training. "You become a problem solver."

Perez de Leza has employed those transferrable skills in consulting, internet services, retail, and finally real estate, an industry in which he has been for nearly 20 years. As European managing director for one of Spain's leading real estate families, he launched projects collectively worth more than €500 million and helped create Spain's first real estate investment trust. He took over at Metrovacesa in 2016, just as the domestic market was taking off. By the time of its IPO in early 2018, Metrocacesa was valued at $2.5 billion. Leading a development company amid today's roller-coaster economic cycles is a challenge, he says, but challenges are something understands. "You need to say, ‘I'm going to do what's best for the company,' and do what you think is right," he says. "You just need to strengthen your heart."

Back the late 1990s, as a young HBS grad working for Boston Consulting Group in San Francisco, Perez de Leza was mostly looking for ways to strengthen his body and stay healthy. He took up hand-crank cycling, and then discovered adaptive skiing at a program called Challenge Aspen, in Colorado. Within a year, he went to the National Ability Center in Park City, Utah, which provides year-round adaptive sports and recreation activities, including horseback riding, cycling, mountain biking, waterskiing, climbing, and others.

Inspired, Perez de Leza started raising money to recruit and bring adaptive-sports trainers to Spain, which at the time had no similar programs. For $12,000, he took 20 American instructors to Spain for a week, which he says was a huge success. Over the years, one week extended to two, then four. Today, almost 25 years later, Fundación Deporte y Desafío (Sport and Challenge Foundation), as it is now known, assists 1,500 people a year, with a budget of over €1 million and six full-time employees.

Balancing his work life, nonprofit life, and family life (Perez de Leza got married two years after HBS and has two daughters) is challenging but worthwhile. Building the foundation has required him to call on the soft skills he learned at HBS. "The people there are not profit driven or bonus driven; they are in life to help people and give back to society," he says. His goals for the foundation are to grow it to the point where it can thrive without him and also to build a Spanish version of the National Ability Center.

While adaptive sports have made a big difference in his own life, Perez de Leza says sharing those benefits with young people is perhaps the most meaningful part for him. "Sports gives you basically an obligation to get up and practice and force yourself to train and to be better, and it's a great tool to help them succeed in school, a profession, university, or whatever," he explains.

Sometimes the biggest change isn't in the kids but in the parents. The more the young people succeed at their chosen sport, the more confident they get in themselves, while their parents learn to let go and trust that their child will be all right on their own. "For the same amount of work, you get twice the change," he says.

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