Apr 2, 2017 | The Blog
Sono cresciuto con i western classici, i primi ancora in bianco e nero. I miei eroi erano John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott e altri divi dell’epoca.
Quando nei primi anni 60 arrivò Clint Eastwood con Per un Pugno di Dollari (diretto da Sergio Leone, che si era ribattezzato John Robertson, mentre il cattivo Gian Maria Volonté era diventato Johnny Wels) fu uno shock.
Il western classico, popolato da figure interamente buone o interamente negative, fu affiancato da un universo parallelo dove i buoni non erano del tutto tali e i cattivi erano, almeno in parte, figure intriganti (pensate a Henry Fonda—Frank—in C’era una volta il West o lo stesso Lee Van Cleef nella parte di Sentenza.)
Avrei sempre voluto vedere John Wayne e Clint Eastwood insieme in un epico e colossale western, con una colonna sonora del grande Ennio Morricone, ma l’occasione non c’è mai stata. John Wayne è morto nel 1979, mentre Clint Eastwood (più giovane di 23 anni) aveva temporaneamente messo da parte i western.
Solo qualche giorno fa, però, mi sono accorto che un intraprendente utente di YouTube ha creato nel 2015 un finto western, dal titolo di Rio Diablo, nel quale ha tirato dentro una manciata di classici eroi di questo genere (c’è perfino Sean Connery) con il supporto di una più che adeguata colonna sonora, che ricorre anche al meglio del maestro Morricone.
Non vi chiedo di prenderlo sul serio, ma spero che ne apprezzerete l’intento, come ho fatto io.
In fondo, chi ama i western chiede solo di essere preso in giro con stile ed eleganza.
Mar 1, 2017 | The Blog
I make Mario’s acquaintance in Dubai. He’s the Regional Sales & Service Manager (Middle East) for a large Italian multinational company and I’m supposed to train 12 of his people operating out of the dazzling city-emirate on an unsurprisingly hot October week.
Mario is from Sicily and speaks very good if accented English. He’s fortyish and full of energy, and his people here like him. They’re mostly Indian and, while culturally and physically different from this husky, blue-eyed guy, they respect his authority and direct manner—however different it may be from their own way of working. They have moved to the UAE at some stage in their past and they know their 3-hour flight on IndiGo from India to Dubai carries hardly any jet lag but a massive paradigm shift.
Mario’s a guy who made the grade in his Sicilian friends’ eyes. He’s got a high-powered job in a large conglomerate, he lives in Dubai as an expatriate, drives a large SUV with a burbling American engine under the hood and lives in a ritzy company-paid house that puts him at the top of the pecking order.
Yet, Mario’s a no-frills guy and does not push his weight around, I watch him interact with his team out of the corner of my eye because that’s what I do and it makes my life interesting.
In a way, I envy him. Twenty years ago, I tried to convince my then employer to open a branch in Dubai and make me the Country Manager. I submitted a business plan and outlined the advantages they could reap by opening up in the UAE, but they never did and I left the company a year later.
Still, I never stopped believing it would have been a very smart move and a lucrative opportunity for me, too. In 5 years—I then figured—I could have made the company and myself a pile of money.
Back to my friend Mario. I just go ahead and ask him, “So, how do you like it here? Is this a plum assignment or what?”
“This place is the dumps—he says—and it’s pretty tough on the family. The job is great but it’s taking a toll on my wife and kid. We have a child—he goes on—and the poor thing spends most of his life in air-conditioned environments. He can hardly go play ball in the backyard in this climate, can he?”
I think back to my childhood, those endless blue-sky days spent running around, riding my bike to undeveloped parts of town, crossing invisible boundaries or crawling under barbed wire into someone’s property. All of this is denied Mario’s child and it’s something I never considered.
Even a ride to the Emirates Park Zoo must be planned, it’s 80 kilometers away in Abu Dhabi and you have to be careful of the child’s exposure to this unrelenting sun. On top of this, his wife doesn’t work and she’s spending a lot of time in the house. However glamorous the location and the furnishings, it’s a gilded cage for her.
This leaves me with a new take on Dubai. I never planned my move in such detail, never made allowances for a wife and child. I was single (again) at the time and only thought in terms of unlimited opportunities for dating—which, truth be told, are still remarkably present in today’s Dubai.
At the end of the training day, I shake Mario’s hand goodbye and thank all participants for their active participation (it’s truly been awesome). I am flying out of Dubai in the early hours of the following morning, so I have a few hours to myself. I decide to visit the Mall of the Emirates, one of the few malls I haven’t seen yet.
But I come back empty-handed. Everything’s too darn expensive if you don’t live here.
Feb 16, 2017 | The Blog
In Stephen R. Covey’s best-seller “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Habit N.7 is called “Sharpen the Saw.” I should know that, as I’m a certified facilitator for a number of seminars based on Dr. Covey’s work.
Covey’s point is we cannot be effective if we don’t take the time to preserve and renew our most precious asset—ourselves. This means setting aside time to regenerate our energies and cultivate our friendships.
As a motorcycle enthusiast since the Seventies, I took the opportunity to do both things at the same time just yesterday. The last time I’d taken my Honda VFR 1200 XTD Crosstourer on a ride was last December—and for a meager 200-kilometer roundtrip.
With a small group of friends, we decided to go on our first bike ride of 2017, thanks to the comparatively mild weather forecasted for Wednesday, February 15. Our destination was Portofino, on the Liguria coast, but we left the finer routing details to the very day of departure. When you ride motorcycles for fun, the ride and the company are all that matters; the destination is only necessary to give you a sense of direction, while the routing often depends on circumstantial factors.
February 15 dawned cold and hazy in Milan, but sunshine was supposed to break through fairly early.
By 09:30, we were heading due south and encountering patches of cold fog that made the initial part of our trip cold, wet and miserable.
By the time we started climbing the Apennine range, the fog disappeared but temperatures stayed just above freezing for a while. Then, having decided to reach the coast by obscure back roads, we left the motorway just at the watershed, in Busalla, and followed a maze of local roads south-east to the seaside town of Recco.
From there we rode east along the coastline until we hit Rapallo, and then followed the splendid cliff road dead-ending at Portofino. By that time, temperatures were around 15° C and the sun dazzling.
After a short lunch break, we decided to head back through Piacenza (some 60 km south-east of Milan) by crossing the Apennines again, this time headed north. We ended up riding on quiet, virtually deserted back roads and trails that had been covered in snow just a few days earlier.
We crossed sleepy villages with smoking chimneys and silent woods barren of leaves etched against the sky. It was a rather tiring ride, because of the uneven road surfaces and the non-stop bends and switchbacks that seemed to go on forever. Open the throttle on the dry stretches and ride on eggshells in the wet, shady corners, with the low winter sun often blinding you through the trees. Still, our reward was the total lack of traffic and the surprisingly clean roads. We were actually expecting to find plenty of slush, gravel and runoff on the roads, which would have made our ride slower and more dangerous, but found almost none.
Once in Piacenza, we refueled and hit the slab all the way home, where we returned to uneventfully after a total ride time of eight hours and a distance of 430 km, nearly two-thirds of which on narrow twisty roads. My hips and shoulders were sore from all those turns, bumps, and ridges, and so were my thighs, which had complemented the bike’s shock absorbers for hours on end.
But, overall, not a bad day at all for an old-timer wishing to sharpen the saw.
Feb 10, 2017 | The Blog
In the first weeks of the Trump presidency, an inordinate amount of American actors and performers, as well as several Democrats and foreign politicians, have called Donald Trump a Fascist or a Nazi.
I’m not surprised at the word choice displayed by show-biz personalities. Most of them have made it big by reading lines written by someone else, and their knowledge of history is sketchy at best. A number of them only have grade-school English and can hardly express their own thoughts in a coherent way.
Nazi or Fascist equal “very bad”, forget about the history behind the words.
Celebs need to stay relevant and, let’s face it, the best way to do so today is to become active in the anti-Trump camp.
When politicians, however, call Donald Trump a Fascist or a Nazi, I ask myself if they know what they’re talking about.
Yes, the man is brash. And, yes, the man’s no career politician—but that’s why he got elected. Moreover, to his voters’ delight, he’s sticking to his campaign promises to a greater degree than any of his predecessors, Obama first of all.
It’s not “fascist” to secure a country’s borders (a law to this effect was passed in 2006, way before Trump’s campaign.) Mexico itself is reinforcing its southern border with Guatemala and Belize, and Obama (who was very vocal against Trump’s wall) even allocated $75 million to help Mexico achieve that goal.
So, can anyone explain why the Trump wall is “fascist” but the Mexican wall isn’t?
It’s not Nazi to enforce immigration laws. Obama himself paused immigration from Iraq for six months in 2011. I don’t recall Robert De Niro or Lady Gaga calling him a Fascist.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of Fascism is “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Nazis, in turn, were followers of their own Fascist-style ideology and their name is short for Nationalsozialist, i.e.: National Socialist.
If you’re really looking for real-life examples of Fascism or Nazism today—and not just crafting insults—you must look to Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, the Ayatollahs’ Iran or Cuba. The People’s Republic of China is a close fourth.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement toward Iran, a clearly autocratic, militaristic theocracy where women and minorities are discriminated against, did not trigger off an outcry from the liberal intelligentsia in the USA and Europe. No Tinseltown actor called Barack Hussein Obama a reckless idiot for signing the nuclear deal with “fascist” Tehran.
Several US Republicans compared him to Neville Chamberlain, but I don’t recall a single Hollywood A-lister doing so. Admittedly, not many in show business know (or care) who Chamberlain was. Madonna probably even thinks It’s some kind of chamber pot.
Do you remember when Hillary Clinton tried her soon-to-fail “reset” with Russia in 2009? Nobody called her a traitor. Yet, the moment President-Elect Donald Trump hinted at defusing tensions with Vladimir Putin, he was called a “traitor” and the magic word “impeachment” was mentioned in Democrat circles. Trump was accused of being a Putin stooge and of having “encouraged” the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Convention’s computers. In actual fact, Barack Obama had been fully aware of Russia’s ongoing hacking shenanigans for years but ignored them until Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016.
Liberals are still shell-shocked from losing an election they thought was in the bag and having to drop their death grip on America’s helm. They’ll use the words Fascist and Nazi on anyone who doesn’t think the way they do—which, ironically, is not the epitome of inclusiveness and liberalism.
This reminds me of the Fifties’ “reductio ad Hitlerum”, whereby you try to “invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.”
Also worth mentioning is the more recent Godwin’s Law that states “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches.”
A popular corollary of this law that its author, Mike Godwin, readily adopted states that whoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.
This seems to be the case with European politicians, American liberals and assorted celebrities.
You can disagree with Trump all you want (it’s called free speech) but you’re making an ass of yourself if you use shopworn and facile insults, the impact of which has been depleted by overuse. In addition, your own credibility drops below zero if your sense of outrage is so evidently selective.
Feb 5, 2017 | The Blog
In my line of work I get to know hundreds of new people each year, whether they be CEOs or front-line employees.
I also spend days within their company premises and experience their organizational climate firsthand by talking with different members of the company—either in a training room or at the coffee machine.
The companies I work with are very diverse, as they range from large automotive or pharma multinationals to smaller manufacturing firms, both in Italy and abroad. One day I could be working in a large truck dealership in Dubai and the next day I could be heading to Frankfurt to run a seminar for the German executives of an Italian group.
More often, you will find me working at—say— a biotech research firm in Southern Italy and the following day I’d be making my way north to a rolled-steel manufacturer in Lombardy, over a thousand kilometers away.
During soft-skills training seminars, the question most participants ask me, regardless of their location, is “Will you train them as well?”—them meaning the company’s management. The head honchos.
It’s unfortunate that the majority of company employees don’t perceive their leaders as being competent enough in interpersonal skills and at motivating people.
- Is it a fact or just the widespread “victim mentality”?
- Do non-stop meetings get in the way of effective communication and feedback?
- How high does employee engagement rank in a top manager’s agenda?
Over several decades of working in and for organizations of every kind, I believe that managers who take the time to communicate and engage with co-workers in an effective way are a minority.
I have been fortunate enough to come across a handful of them in my career and I’ve tried to follow their example whenever I had a team to lead.
Still, the majority of management types are poor communicators and display a disappointing set of priorities.
Thus, open employee communication—which generally ranks among the top company values proudly framed and displayed at reception—often doesn’t make it beyond the reception area.
Gen 31, 2017 | The Blog
Se nell’uso dell’inglese saltano spesso fuori gli insidiosi “falsi amici”, c’è un’altra categoria di vocaboli che pone un grosso ostacolo alla comprensione reciproca, quelli che io chiamo i “completi estranei” e di cui parleremo tra un attimo.
E’ ormai cognizione comune che eventually non è la traduzione di eventualmente e che to prevaricate non vuol dire vessare o tiranneggiare.
Allo stesso modo, molti utenti italiani della lingua inglese sanno che actual non vuol dire attuale, ma effettivo.
I “completi estranei” sono invece ancora più traditori, perché si tratta di vere parole inglesi entrate a significare cose diverse in italiano.
Prima tra tutte è mobbing, nel senso di intimidire o vessare sul luogo di lavoro.
Mobbing deriva da mob, termine dispregiativo per indicare la folla (o, scritto con la M maiuscola, un’associazione mafiosa, cioé the Mob). La parola mob è fatta risalire al termine latino mobile vulgus, o folla incostante e non è slang recente, visto che è in uso comune da più di 300 anni. Il termine scientifico mobbing indica l’attività aggressiva congiunta di un gruppo di animali nei confronti di un comune nemico e, per estensione, anche l’attività ostile da parte di più persone nei confronti di uno o più individui.
Ecco quindi il punto di contatto tra la parola inglese e il significato che gli viene dato in italiano quando si parla di pressioni psicologiche.
Il problema sta nel fatto che, descrivendo il fenomeno ad un interlocutore inglese, è pressoché garantito che la parola mobbing non sia compresa. In inglese si dice hazing, bullying o harassment.
L’uso comune di “to mob” in inglese descrive l’assalto da parte di una folla, come per esempio nella frase: “The Hollywood star was mobbed by fans at the airport,”
Ecco perché sconsiglio di usare mobbing quando l’attività in questione è invece hazing o bullying. In caso contrario, verrete (forse) capiti solo da un sociologo o da un ornitologo.
E in italiano prenderei le distanze dalla parola mobbizzare, che è semplicemente orrenda.
Un altro termine da evitare è footing usato nel senso di fare corsa.
In inglese, footing indica solo l’appoggio del piede (anche figurato) oppure il livello o la statura (in senso figurato) di un individuo.
Quindi si dirà “he regained his footing” di qualcuno che sia scivolato, oppure “they demanded equal footing in the new company”, riferito a persone che chiedano trattamento paritario.
Per tradurre in inglese l’attività atletica di cui sopra si usano jogging o running, che la descrivono senza possibilità di fraintendimento.
Sono cresciuto con i western classici, i primi ancora in bianco e nero. I miei eroi erano John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott e altri divi dell’epoca.