“The Taste of Outdoing Yourself” from Club Nautico Rimini Magazine

“How to enjoy life through the joy of work.”

“I have just returned from Sydney. This quiet Solent inspired me to respond to the very welcome request of the Club Nautico Rimini to tell that corner of my life that I hope will interest younger people. The Sydney - Hobart would have been my father's dream. And I was born looking at the sea. The sea is my energy, my nature, my spirit. The helm, as well as any other manoeuvre, in winter in the Bay of Naples on a tramontana day is the way to reconnect with my history, family, city of origin and ancestral roots. Naples is not just a place where you are born; Naples is a way of feeling life that cannot be explained; it is a memory that never leaves you, wherever you are.

This brief introduction of who I am starts with what matters to me and serves to introduce the few strong messages I would like to leave with the younger generation and a few adults willing to listen. The first message is that life is joy. And I want to start with this wonderful feeling that the sea gives me. Joy means that you are personally responsible for building a life path that, first and foremost, makes you happy. Abandon all stereotypes; there are no noble jobs and disreputable jobs.

Any work can be done well and get you where you want to be, according to the effort you want to put into it. The important thing is that you feel joy when you wake up and think about what you will do during the day. I help companies grow and be profitable. It is a job that I love and that gives me so much. I enjoy it so much that I don't consider it a job. It is a passion.

There are many like me worldwide: you see it when a person works well and is happy with what they do. Naturally, it's a difficult job. Quite difficult. This is the second important message: I left Naples and only returned there on vacation. I devoted my life to the firm first and followed my clients worldwide later.

I left the boats, I left the sea, I left my passions, I neglected my friends...I decided to do this job well. And everything else, my whole self, fell by the wayside. Being stubborn, strong-willed, not sparing yourself, fighting for your ideas, and pushing yourself to the limit of your strength is what makes life beautiful.

The second rule is knowing how to give up the things we like to fulfil our dreams. Unfortunately, those who want to make their passage on earth meaningful cannot give it up for a pizza and four jumps at a disco. He must give himself a few pinches on his belly and find the strength within yourself to make it.

Whatever the starting point. Nothing can stop a girl or boy who has decided to pursue their dreams. And here we come to the third and most important of the suggestions: don't be afraid of anything, ever. The world is full of fools who want to feel important by making you feel inadequate. At least once a year, read the book “Allegro ma non troppo” by Carlo Maria Cipolla; read it in just an hour, and it gives you the strength to look around you with different eyes, learning to distinguish between those who want to help you and those who try to hold you back because that way he feels stronger.

Anything is possible; you just have to want to do it and find the right people to help you. Think of the case of the five Mariscadoras of Rimini, the five female entrepreneurs who have made Blue Crab a million-dollar business. Carlotta, Ilaria, Alice, Giulia and Matilda called me for guidance and suggestions. As chance would have it, I had always dedicated part of my time to helping young people enter the business world.

For some time now, I have focused even more on initiating girls into business. Because I help companies, especially in the agribusiness sector, develop products and internationalize, I am fortunate to have so many relationships worldwide and so much experience. Having understood the project, I left for the US a few days later. I immediately found American buyers interested in buying all the crab that Mariscadoras could produce. We enter into a supply chain agreement to hold the price firm from crab to fisherman but with a commitment to pick up all the catch, any quantity and at any time. The demand for blue crab in the US market is huge, and the price is high.

The quality of Italian products is better than that of Mexican and Far Eastern products, as is its industrial credibility. And the game is up. There was the demand; we built the supply, and a particularly thriving and sustainable, but above all scalable, business took off. It was easier than it might have appeared. The women entrepreneurs were and are stubborn and determined; they dedicated their lives to this by giving up some passion and fun on the altar of the enterprise; they sought out someone knowledgeable to help them ... and the world followed. Banks, politics, marinas, fishermen, processing industrialists.

It was all easier than anyone could have imagined. All you had to do was want it.

My forcibly simplifying the case also serves as a message to the other guys: look around; the world is full of opportunities not seized by people who cannot see them, understand them, or take advantage of them. Look for lazy sectors used to secured earnings and find new ways to meet the real needs of markets and people.

The agricultural world is undoubtedly one of them: only few really knows the benefits of Italian biodiversity and is capable of offering them worldwide. However, in the same condition are the services to businesses and people and the old-fashioned world of commercial distribution, which has not yet understood what a consumer who has changed profoundly since the 1980s is looking for.

Youngers are our future. Society needs to take charge of training them and helping them build the skills they need for the world we live in. In the internationalization system that EDI proposes to companies, we have invented a win-win solution for human resources. Since no career manager would come to work for an Italian company that is entering the market because of the unacceptable level of risk, we proposed to our clients to use retirees or, better yet, competent resources who have just retired.

They are very experienced in their work, and still, with a lot of energy, they became powerful engines looking for a form of redemption for a world that had set them aside prematurely. Dubbed Project RED (Retired Extremely Dangerous), it became a way to create an expert organization that serves companies with high potential but little attractiveness to the local labour market.

We could use the same pattern to launch young people into worlds where a little experience and many contacts could make a difference. People considered retired must not feel abandoned but understand that they can play an essential role in society: making themselves available to new generations to teach, help, and build with them.

We need a model of generational synergy where generosity must infect the exchange: experience versus energy and enthusiasm. Then, we will no longer have bored retirees but experienced coaches of many startups in the lives of young people.

This is one of the missions of EDI – Eccellenze D’Impresa, the consulting firm I founded around the principles I have described so far. A free and independent company devoted to the good of its clients, dedicated to the study and publication of innovative and disruptive management ideas. To be a reference point for enlightened management. A company that knows how to look beyond its classical perimeter. One that wants to go beyond it. A society that accepts the slogan, the taste of surpassing oneself, as the motto that informs our lives. A company that stands by its clients as partners and fights together with the entrepreneur by being part of his team.

But what are the ingredients for building a consulting firm like EDI?

A lot of entrepreneurial spirit. But especially that spirit that has been lost over the years is the spirit of service: we serve our clients and their success. We are humble by nature, and we know how to listen. We know how to listen even to the unspoken words. We know how to feel the vibrations of the soul and the dynamics of group managers, even beyond the stated. We have chosen only one group of clients: Italian entrepreneurs. This is because their way of functioning is sanguine, impulsive, and doer-oriented, just like us.

Their way of functioning radically differs from that of structured management, which works by processes and, often, has lost the ability to “get things done.” Then you need professional curiosity: we breed professionals who aim to become number one in the world in their field. The determination must be there, and it must be felt.

Maybe they will get it to the top five but for sure they won't stay in the middle of the pack. They must know how to choose: management consulting is full of all-rounders, suitable for every season and every company. We don't. We follow only Italian agribusiness entrepreneurs worldwide and for all aspects that can increase equity value in the long term. We have the foundational value of studying supply chain verticals to the most minor organizational details. We don't just discuss best practices and benchmarks; we analyze everything behind those performances to understand and govern their profit drivers.

We take Italian entrepreneurs abroad and help them develop products by customizing them to the needs of local markets. We help build the management team, make the factory and interface with the business realities of the destination countries. To do all this, we need the company to understand the central role of diversity and inclusion in innovation processes.

Diversity & inclusion mean that business strategy must be based on the ability to listen internally and externally to all the social components of the business ecosystem, especially in the target markets. If the strategy is derived from listening, the more diverse the management team and the markets to which products are targeted, the richer and more successful the strategy will be. Very mundane but quite cogent: only those with a diverse team and an effectively inclusive attitude win in markets and product development.

So, we are building an EDI that plastically represents this: diversity is central to team building.

I have to state loudly and unequivocally that doing all this is fun. It is a living matter.

It gives you the feeling of shaping and changing the reality of companies, empowering them to become very long-term projects, making them engines for the development of the area, and giving a sense of protection to future generations through increasing the equity value in the long-term.

Perhaps it becomes easier to understand why I tenderly caress my past but choose to give it up. Why the Sydney - Hobart remains an unattainable dream, why Naples is just a gouache stuck in the living room, why the boline with the tramontana is just an image I use to relax before bed, and why the flavours of my childhood are a heritage I do not want to share. The spaghetti alla vongole in bianco, sautéed in a pan inside which you have broken a rock crab sautéed with garlic oil and parsley, that scent of seaweed in your nose when you lie exhausted on a Cenito rock after a long swim in front of Naples, are yours alone, they cannot go on Masterchef and do not want to stand up to the judgment of the salons of the kitchen.

Just as a simple pasta and potato or potato, onion and tomato route, those plain dishes cherished by those who had a less affluent childhood do not deserve an arbitrator's judgment. And no one can judge the carbonara that I was lucky enough to eat almost every day with a very old Giuseppe Ungaretti during my adolescence. That endless gaze, the suffering and hope he was able to communicate, and the joy of those who experienced the absolute pain that shared those dishes make the controversy over guanciale versus pancetta a vulgar display of arrogance know-it-all.

Leave me my sacred memories that I need to change the world for the better.”