"Children of" Privilege and Constant Conflict? Entrepreneurs Do Better.

Article published in Corriere della Sera on August 3, 2026, by Carlo Cinelli.

Succession battles and contested inheritances are only isolated cases that do not undermine an otherwise healthy entrepreneurial fabric. Because today, all innovation comes from entrepreneurs. A conversation with Luigi Consiglio, who, together with Gianni Dal Pozzo, is launching Italy’s first independent consulting group.

“There is a generation of talented young people who are building businesses and creating companies, even if they are not ‘children of’. At the same time, there are entrepreneurial success stories led by ‘children of’ who have the strength and ability to do so. Saying, ‘He is the son of… therefore he is an idiot on horseback,’ is a cliché. There may be some cases, but the majority is something entirely different.”

Pressed to comment on recent events involving highly conflictual families within Italian capitalism and inheritances that turn into long and costly positional battles, usually at the expense of the companies, Luigi Consiglio ultimately chooses to reaffirm the perspective developed through 40 years of business consulting. Without scandal or moralizing about incompetence. And he argues that he does so for good reason, because “today, all innovation is generated by entrepreneurs within their own companies, as they have the ability to observe, imagine, and invest in technology and development in ways that are not permitted within highly structured organizations.”

The opportunity for a broader reflection on Italian entrepreneurs comes from the new alliance that Eccellenze d’Impresa, the company led by Consiglio, has just signed with Considi, the Vicenza-based company led by Gianni Dal Pozzo and chaired by Fabio Cappellozza, a former Arthur Andersen executive.

Considi Holding has been established with the aim of creating Italy’s first independent management consulting group, bringing together 400 professionals and €40 million in combined revenue. It is the great alliance of smaller firms: 13 specialized companies, including IC&Partners of Udine, Vitale-Zane of Brescia, Sinedi of Vicenza, and Sustain Tech Hub of Rovigo. An alliance of independent consulting firms serving small businesses and industrial districts between North-Eastern Italy and Milan.

The focus

Consiglio, who left Gea in 2023, where he was Senior Partner and Chairman — and where there is also a family story, since Mario Consiglio was among the founders of Gea after leaving Pietro Gennaro & Associati — explains:

“There is room in the market for everyone, but the major consulting firms have always considered the entrepreneurial world too costly in relation to the effort required. How much does it cost me to deploy a team of eight people to convince a mill owner in Puglia to take the next step, compared with restructuring a heavyweight state-owned company? I know it may sound paradoxical, but Italian entrepreneurship is not attractive to the major consulting firms. For us, it is a challenge every day. Consulting boutiques, however,” argue Consiglio, Dal Pozzo, and Cappellozza, “are tailor-made teams for businesses where work is a calling. The focus of independent consulting is the mill owner in Puglia and others like him, as well as the companies of Italy’s Fourth Capitalism,” Consiglio explains.

With clients of this kind, the approach must also be carefully calibrated:

“The central part of our profession is bringing people with us, and this is what distinguishes high-quality consulting from the mass of those who are only capable of producing analyses. Analyses are essential, but if you do not bring the client with you, they are useless.”

“Why Considi Holding? Because we are independent. We have no controlling owners, we do not have to provide returns on capital, we do not have to make money to repay a private equity fund, and we do not have an American shareholder. Our only objective is to create an advantage for our entrepreneurial clients, and we make this our greatest strength.”

“The strategy that leads to go-to-market and internationalization, together with in-depth knowledge of a sector such as food in all its forms, is what Eccellenze d’Impresa brings to us,” explains CEO Dal Pozzo. “We come from the world of operations: we are the ones who make the components move.”

Considi was created as a spin-off from Arthur Andersen. At the end of the 1980s, four young managers led by Professor Marco Vitale left one of the Big Five, well before the Enron collapse and the creation of Accenture, and succeeded in establishing a joint venture with the largest Japanese consulting company, which still exists today, to create JMAC-Considi. Vitale’s intuition proved correct, and the principles of the Toyota system, later known worldwide as lean organization, were widely studied and adopted in the West.

Considi remains Toyota Industrial’s exclusive partner in Italy today, and Porter’s Value Chain — the application of an economic model that, for the first time, systematically addresses a company’s costs and margins — remains one of the distinguishing methodologies of these business consultants. Dal Pozzo also acknowledges that Consiglio studied and worked with Michael Porter.

The Japanese partnership, Chairman Cappellozza explains, remains active and enables an exchange of knowledge and innovation for the benefit of companies. In which sectors? In luxury, the executives explain, Considi works with many brands belonging to the leading French group, as well as in the design industry. With the arrival of Eccellenze d’Impresa, all three Fs of Made in Italy are now represented: Food, Furniture, and Fashion.

Meanwhile, the world is moving quickly. This is demonstrated by what happened to Accenture one month ago, when its shares fell by 20% on Wall Street following a quarterly profit warning regarding the impact of artificial intelligence on the consulting sector.

“Paradoxically, artificial intelligence eliminates the ‘scale factor’,” Consiglio comments. “If I have to compete with a company ten times larger than ours, as large as a multinational corporation, artificial intelligence brings me to the same level. It eliminates the information gap, historically one of the main problems in our industry. It is a revolution that rewards our work based on benchmarking, best practices, and delivery: in other words, the ability to bring the entrepreneur with us.”