Managerial Insights

Li Chun Liu

Airline Cabin Crew Perspectives: The Operational Feasibility of Reducing Food Waste

Download the PDF Introduction Inflight food waste has become a visible sustainability problem for commercial aviation. In fact, airlines are facing mounting pressure to improve their environmental performance while maintaining service quality, operational reliability, and cost discipline. Before the pandemic, commercial aviation operated at a scale that made even small inefficiencies consequential (O’Connell, 2018). In 2019, the industry carried 4.5 billion passengers and generated revenues of $838 billion (International Air Transport Association, 2020). Food waste matters in this context because ...

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2026-11-06 E&M Plus

Beyond the Algorithm: Rethinking Management Education

If algorithms can analyze data, build scenarios, generate strategies, and produce in seconds work that until recently required specialized expertise, what should the education of managers and professionals focus on today? Which capabilities will continue to distinguish human judgment from the answers provided by artificial intelligence? And how can we learn to work with increasingly sophisticated systems without delegating our thinking to them? On Wednesday December 9, 2026, on Zoom, these questions will take center stage in the third Economia & Management TalkSpace webinar. Organized in collaboration ...

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2026-11-06 Claudio Zara, Martina Barbaglia

The Circular Transition as a Lever for Reducing Default Risk

Download the PDF The way we produce and consume goods is colliding with the ecological, social, and material limits of our planet; in recent years this has become increasingly clear. For decades, economic growth has been supported by the traditional linear model, based on the take-make-dispose logic: Resources are extracted, transformed into products, consumed, and ultimately discarded. This paradigm rests on two assumptions that now appear unrealistic: on the one hand, the continuous and relatively low-cost availability of natural resources; on the other, the capacity of ecosystems to absorb ...

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2026-11-04 Roberto Vona, Fabrizio Di Girolamo

Lessons from tennis: unconventional reflections on corporate distress

Even people who are not tennis fans know that the forehand and backhand are the two basic strokes of the game. At tennis clubs, moreover, one often hears that the preferred stroke - or the one most players execute better - is the forehand, but it is clear that the backhand is no less important, for the obvious reason that without the latter there would be no forehand. The forehand represents what seems more intuitive and, mechanically, more immediate or easier to execute, whereas the backhand, generally more difficult to perform, is often implicitly associated with what is counterintuitive, because, ...

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2026-10-30 Donatella Depperu, Ilaria Galavotti, Nicolò Grassa, Edoardo Seveso

AI and Strategy: Adoption and Prospects in Italian Companies

Download the PDF Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly central role in organizations, one which is extending across nearly every area of business. So it is unsurprising that a growing body of research has accompanied the managerial debate, examining the benefits, challenges, and implications of AI (Jobstreibizer et al., 2025). Yet while studies on AI in business processes have multiplied rapidly, its role in strategy formulation remains comparatively underexplored. It is now well established that AI can influence what companies do and how they implement strategy—that is, the ...

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2026-10-30 Maria Carmela Ostillio

Banca Etica and Youth: Communication, Trust, and Verifiable Value

Download the article The relationship between younger generations and the banking system is undergoing a profound transformation. On the one hand, Generation Z and young adults are engaging with financial tools at an increasingly early age and through increasingly digital means, thanks to the widespread use of electronic payments, banking applications, and digital financial services (Banca d’Italia, 2024). On the other hand, they often have a cautious and discontinuous relationship with banking institutions, which they frequently perceive as complex and difficult to understand, particularly ...

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2026-10-30 Silvia Bagdadli, Beatrice Manzoni

From Coach to Leader Coach: Tools and Competencies for People Development

Download the PDF In an economic environment marked by accelerating change, continuous innovation, and compounding complexity, an organization’s ability to learn and adapt has become a key source of competitiveness. Technologies, business models, and skills are evolving so rapidly that knowledge which represented a distinctive edge just a few years ago can become obsolete. In this context, human capital is no longer simply a resource to be managed, but a primary driver of innovation, organizational adaptation, and the creation of competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate. The rise ...

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2026-10-27 Francesco Morace, Marco Zanardi

From ownership to experience: retail that distributes the future

On May 2, 2026, during his lectio magistralis in Parma, Brian Eno—the inventor of ambient music and a leading experimenter in artistic, sound, and light installations—introduced his two projects, SEED and My Light Years, presented in two locations in the city (the Monumental Complex of San Paolo and the Ospedale Vecchio), by explaining: my goal has always been to invent worlds in which people could feel good. If we had to summarize what we have illustrated in these pages, outlining the current state of retail and imagining its role in distributing the future, we could repeat the same idea. ...

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2026-10-23 Federico Ciuccarelli

Trust and prosperity in agentic commerce: the tour operator as a digital guarantor

n the early 1990s, entering your credit card details on a website seemed like a gamble. Yet in less than a decade, e-commerce became one of the pillars of global trade. What changed? Not the technology, which had already been available for some time, but the trust infrastructure built around it: secure payments, verified reviews, buyer protection, shared rules. It was an institutional innovation before it was a digital one. Today, we are witnessing a similar but more radical transformation. With agentic commerce, AI agents will not simply search for information: they will negotiate terms, make ...

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2026-10-14 Rossella Cappetta

Beyond Narratives That Evade Responsibility: Designing the Beauty of Work

The transformation of communities and businesses today is inseparable from work transformation. This is not merely a technological or organizational change in how economic activities are carried out, but a deeper metamorphosis that touches society, identity, and meaning. At the heart of this evolution lies the way we conceive of work (and by contrast, otium, or “non-work”) along with the meaning and the ultimate purpose we ascribe to it. We also need to include in the conversation the relationships among people working in different roles and under different conditions, the bond between workers ...

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