Opinions & Interviews
Action plans and uncertainty
These days, we are all looking for ways to cope with a future that looks increasingly uncertain. Uncertainty creates fear. Fear blocks energy, proactivity, and rational thinking; it is capable of completely taking over our mind and derailing our thoughts. Many of us respond to fear and uncertainty with optimism. Optimism is an integral part of our nature: research has shown that neuromodulator dopamine enhances people’s ability to think positively about their future. We are more inclined to change our beliefs when presented with positive pieces of information about the future than to review ...
The Cardinal Points of Phase 2
In recent weeks, the debate has focused exclusively on the need for reopening the economy and the beginning of what is called "phase 2." Many businesses and commercial activities are demanding this, along with their institutional representatives as well. In various cases this is an unjustified request, because for many sectors there is a crisis of demand that will last for months, until people feel safe. For example, if the entire tourism sector were to open up again in two weeks, there would not be sufficient customers to sustain it. Yet there are other sectors (especially intermediate and capital ...
In Search of Lost Profitability
The lead articles in the Financial Times from last February 25 and 26[1] show that European banks are having increasing difficulty finding top managers, since such figures are strongly attracted by the lavish salaries received by their counterparts in the United States. Such managers have become rare on the market in Europe, and almost non-existent within individual banks, that are said not to have adequately prepared for the substitution of those human resources. It is difficult to say if the problem exists for Italian banks as well, but the fact that when a choice must be made they always end ...
Great Evils and Great Errors
To improve, it is necessary to recognize one's mistakes. This is a basic, simple principle that we all learn when we are children, for example while at school: when you make a spelling mistake in a dictation, the teacher highlights it in red. Here you made a mistake, don't do it again. And it doesn't matter if out of a hundred words, seventy were right. You must concentrate on the thirty that you got wrong. We have all been there, yet it seems that many forget this simple principle. The events of recent weeks have tragically highlighted the fact that many errors have been made. We see this in ...
Competition and Concentration between Banks, Neobanks, and Payment Institutions
Competition and concentration are phenomena that simultaneously regard traditional banks, “neobanks,” and payment institutions. The first are proper financial intermediaries; the third are service companies that at least for now, do not intermediate anything; while the second are relatively hybrid entities, although it is difficult to generalize because they are very varied. The evolution of the context in which these three categories of operators act starts from the idea of being able to produce new financial services of various types, especially payment services, in a simple, low-cost, efficient, ...
Lavazza’s Response to the Great Challenge
The pandemic upon us has caused an emergency that will have a very significant impact on the international economy. Our country and its business and productive fabric will have to go through a test of resistance, just a short time after the one already passed after the financial crisis of 2008. This event - whose unforeseeability and rapid spread found us unprepared nationally and globally - forces us to rethink and reconfigure our way of approaching business, our relations with society, and our way of belonging to a community. Lavazza decided to act immediately, in the initial days of the crisis, ...
Multimedia Publishing Faces the Test of Covid-19
Being a multimedia outlet in the era of Covid-19 is a daily challenge that necessarily requires a keeping one eye on the present, and the other looking to the future. When the first signs arose at the end of February, Mediaset took measures to face what was an unprecedented crisis. The initial goal was to guarantee the safety of the company’s personnel; the second was to adopt methods of operation that would guarantee the continuation of activities, that in this period can be considered a true public service. The first meeting of the Crisis Committee (created within the organization in November ...
The Great Europe We Want
We will come out of this crisis more Italian. My hope, though, is that Covid-19 will also make us more European. While we have rediscovered a sense of community and national solidarity, it is also true that at an economic level, this is the time when the great European project envisioned by the founding fathers – De Gasperi, Adenauer, and Schuman – must find its concrete expression. On a human level, we are understandably clinging to solidarity. But the reality is that we are facing a challenge we had never foreseen, a completely different situation even than the great global crisis of 2008; ...
Italy stands tall
On March 7, there were 31,506 cases of Coronavirus (COVID-19) recorded in Italy, following an exponential growth curve. The number of dead is 2,503, with a lethality rate of 7.9 percent. The epidemic is principally affecting Lombardy and the rest of Northern Italy, but there are hotspots present in all regions of the country. This is the worst health catastrophe ever recorded in the history of Italy and of advanced countries since World War II, with dramatic consequences for the social and economic situation as well. In this phase, the fight against the epidemic is playing out on two fundamental ...
Italian Businesses Exposed to Contagion
The Covid-19 coronavirus will have a negative impact on Italian businesses. The question is not “if,” but how many will be affected and how strong the impact will be. Just as predictions regarding the evolution of the situation among people are uncertain, the same is true for businesses. Yet there are some differences between the two populations, that of the human race and that of businesses. In the first case (which includes people with clear symptoms, hospitalized, in intensive care, and dead) the contagion fortunately represents a small percentage, while in the second the “contagion” ...