“The pleasure of surpassing oneself” from the Magazine Club Nautico Rimini

“How to enjoy life through the joy of work”

"I have just returned from Sydney. This quiet Solent gave me the inspiration to respond to the very welcome request of the Rimini Nautical Club to talk about that corner of my life that I hope will be of interest to younger people.The Sydney – Hobarth would have been my father's dream, in fact. And I was born looking at the sea. The sea is my energy, my nature, my spirit.The rudder, like any other manoeuvre, in winter, in the Gulf of Naples on a north wind day, is the way to reconnect with my history, my family, my city of origin and my 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 abandons you, wherever you are.

This brief presentation of who I am starts from what matters to me and serves to introduce the few strong messages that I would like to leave to the younger ones and to some adults available to listen.The first message is that life is joy.And it is precisely from this wonderful sensation that the sea gives me that I want to leave.Joy means that you are personally responsible for building a life path that, first and foremost, makes you happy.Abandon every stereotype, there are no noble jobs and unbecoming jobs.

Any job can be done well and can lead to where you want, with the amount of effort you want to put into it.The important thing is that you feel joy when you wake up in the morning and think about what you will do during the day. MeI help companies grow and earn. It's a job that I love and that gives me a lot.I enjoy it so much that I don't even consider it a job. It's a passion.

I see many like me around the world: you see it when a person works well, when he is happy with what he does. Of course it's a difficult job. Pretty difficult. This is the second important message: I left Naples and I only go back on holiday. I dedicated my life to studying first and then to following my clients around the world.

I abandoned the boats, I abandoned the sea, I abandoned my passions, I neglected my friends...I decided that I would do this job well. And everything else, all of myself, took a back seat. Being stubborn, strong-willed, not sparing yourself, fighting for your ideas, pushing yourself to the limit of your strength is what makes life beautiful.

Knowing how to give up the things we like to make our dreams come true is the second rule.Whoever wants to give meaning to their passage on earth, unfortunately, cannot give it up for a pizza and a night out at the disco. He has to pinch himself and find the strength within himself to do 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 tip: don't be afraid of anything, ever. The world is full of stupid people who want to feel important by making you feel inadequate. Read the book at least once a year“Cheerful but not too much”by Carlo Maria Cipolla, you read it in an hour and it gives you 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 they feel stronger.

Everything is possible, you just need to want to do it and find the good and right people to help you.Think about the five o'clock caseMariscadorasof Rimini, the five entrepreneurs whohave made the Blue Crab a million dollar business. Carlotta, Ilaria, Alice, Giulia and Matilda called me for some addresses and suggestions. As luck would have it, I have always dedicated part of my time to helping young people enter the world of work.

For some time now I have focused even more on encouraging girls to do business. Since I help companies, especially inagri-food sector, to develop products and internationalize, I am lucky enough to have many relationships all over the world, as well as a lot of experience. Once I understood the project, a few days later I left for the USA. I immediately found American buyers interested in buying all the crabMariscadorascould produce. We stipulate a supply chain agreement to keep the price fixed from the crab to the fisherman but with the commitment to collect all the catch, any quantity and at any time. Evidently the demand for blue crab on the American market is enormous and the price is high.

The quality of the Italian product is better than that of Mexico and that of the Far East as is its industrial credibility. And thethat's it.The demand was there, we built the offer and a particularly thriving and sustainable, but above all scalable, business started. It was easier than it might appear.The women entrepreneurs were and are stubborn and determined, they dedicated their lives to this, giving up some passion and fun on the altar of business, they looked for someone expert who made themselves available to help... and the world followed them. Banks, politics, navies, fishermen, processing industrialists.

It was all easier than you could imagine.It was enough to want it.

My forced simplification of the case also serves as a message for the other guys:look around you, the world is full of opportunitiesnot grasped by people who are unable to see them, understand them or exploit them.Look for lazy sectors, accustomed to guaranteed earnings, and find new ways to respond to the real needs of markets and people.

The worldagriculturalis certainly one of these: no one knows the advantages of Italian biodiversity and no one proposes them around the world. But services to businesses and people are in the same conditions as is the old world of commercial distribution which has not yet understood what a consumer is looking for, which has changed profoundly compared to the 1980s.

Kids are our future.It is essential that society, as a whole, takes responsibility for training them and helping them build the skills necessary for the world we live in. In the internationalization system that we at EDI offer 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 due to the unacceptable level of risk, we have proposed to our clients to use pensioners or, better yet, competent resources who have just retired.

Very expert in their work and still with a lot of energy, they have become powerful engines in search of a form of redemption towards a world that had set them aside prematurely. Renamed the RED (Retired Extremely Dangerous) project, it has become the way to create an expert organization serving companies with high potential but little attractiveness for the local job market.

We could use the same scheme to launch young people towards worlds where a little experience and lots of contacts could make the difference. It is important that people considered retired do not feel abandoned, but understand that they can play an important role in society, i.e.making ourselves available to the 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. And then we will no longer have bored pensioners but expert coaches of many startups in the lives of young people.

This is one of the missions ofEDI – Business Excellence, the consultancy company I founded around the principles I have described so far. A companyfree and independent, dedicated to the good of its customers, dedicated to the study and publication of innovative and disruptive managerial ideas. With the aim ofbe a point of reference for enlightened management. A company that knows how to look beyond its classic perimeter. Who wants to go further. A society that accepts the slogan: the pleasure of surpassing oneself, as the motto that informs our lives. A company that stands alongside its customers as partners and who fight together with the entrepreneur by being part of his team.

But what are the ingredients to build a consultancy company like EDI?Definitely a lot of entrepreneurial spirit. But above all that spirit that has been lost over the years which is the spirit of service: we are at the service of our customers and their success. We are humble by nature and know how to listen.We know how to listen even to unspoken words.We know how to feel the vibrations of the soul and the dynamics of groups of managers, even beyond what is declared. we have chosen a single group of customers: Italian entrepreneurs.And this is because their way of functioning is sanguine, impulsive and action-oriented, exactly like us.

And their way of functioning is radically different from that of structured management, which works by processes and, often, has lost the ability to "do".Then you need professional curiosity: we raise professionals who aim to become number one in the world in their sector. The determination must be that, and it must be perceived.

Maybe they will reach the top five, but they certainly won't remain in the middle of the table. They must know how to choose: management consultancy is full of all-rounders, good for every season and every company. We don't. We only follow Italian agri-food entrepreneurs, throughout the world and in all aspects capable of increasing the value of equity in the long term. We have the founding value of studying the verticals of the supply chains down to the smallest organizational details. We don't just talk about best practices and benchmarks but 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 managerial team, set up the factory and interface with the commercial realities of the destination countries. To do all this we absolutely need the company to understand the central role of diversity & inclusion in innovative processes.

Diversity&inclusion means for us that the business strategy must be based on the ability to listen internally and externally to all the social components of the company ecosystem, especially on the target markets.If the strategy derives from listening, it follows that the more diversified the managerial group and the markets for which the products are intended, the richer and more successful the strategy will be. Very banal but rather cogent: only those who have a diverse team and an effectively inclusive attitude win in the markets and in product development.

We are therefore building an EDI that plastically represents all this: diversity is central in building the team.

I must state strongly and unequivocally that doing all of this is a lot of fun. It is living matter.

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

Perhaps it becomes easier to understand why I caress my past with tenderness but have chosen to renounce it. Because Sydney – Hobarth remains an unattainable dream, because Naples is just a gouache stuck in the living room, because the windward winds with the north wind are just an image that I use to relax before sleeping and because the flavors of my childhood are a heritage that I don't want to share. Spaghetti with clams in white, sautéed in a pan in which you have broken a small rock crab sautéed with garlic, oil and parsley, that scent of seaweed in your nose when you lie down exhausted on a rock in Cenito after a long swim in front of Naples, they are yours alone, they cannot go to Masterchef and they do not want to withstand the judgment of the kitchen's soloists.

Just as a poor pasta and potatoes or a wheel of potatoes, onions and tomato, those poor dishes dear to those who had a less wealthy childhood, do not deserve an arbitral judgment. And no one can judge the carbonaras that I was lucky enough to eat almost every day together with a very old manGiuseppe Ungarettiduring my adolescence. That infinite gaze, the suffering and hope that he was able to communicate, the joy of those who experienced the absolute pain that those dishes seasoned, make the controversy over bacon versus bacon a vulgar exhibition of arrogant saccharine.

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

Extract from the publicationMagazine Club Nautico Rimini—12.2024PDF version