Il Caffè: Your Insider’s Guide to Drinking Coffee Like You Mean It
Get it right and the bar opens up. Get it wrong and the bar notices There is a moment, somewhere around your second day in Italy, when you realise the bar is not just a place to get coffee or a panino. It is a room with a social code (un codice sociale). The people...
Likability Beats Skills Every Day of the Week.
This is what I notice. Entrepreneurs and executives seek efficiencies, for scale, for output. They don’t stop to call people on the phone, and they forget that the people on the other side of every trade, every negotiation, every partnership are still running on the...
The Italian Advantage: The Inter Milan Blueprint
Inter Milan Is Not Madrid's Little Brother. It Is Its Equal. Let us start with a fact that most people in Italian football do not know, or prefer not to say out loud. Italy is richer per capita than Spain. Not slightly. By 18 percent. GDP per capita in Italy stands at...
THE BEST DEAL IN FOOTBALL
How a Distressed Debt Firm Stole Inter Milan, Built an Empire, and Is Now Deciding Whether to Sell the Crown Jewel of Italian Football A Club on Its Knees May 2021. The San Siro sits half-empty, Europe is still locked down, and Inter Milan, freshly victorious of Serie...
The Ten Words That Get You Treated Like Family in Italy
The social code no app will teach you, and every local already knows I have watched it happen dozens of times in Venice, Roma and in Lake Garda. A line forms outside a busy trattoria, five or six tourists standing single file at the door, waiting for someone to talk...
Dolce Far Niente: The Productivity Secret Italy Never Called Productivity
Walk through an Italian town in the early afternoon and you might think something has gone wrong. The shops are shut. The streets are empty. In the one trattoria still open, a fork turns slowly against the side of a plate, in no hurry to get anywhere. Nothing is...
Likability Leadership: The First Mover Advantage Nobody Is Trading On
Markets reward people who move first. This is well know in investment and entrepreneurship, particularly in tech. We know it in deal flow. We know it in the race to plant a flag before the crowd arrives. Yet there is one first mover advantage sitting out there that...
The Phone Call Is a Leadership Arbitrage. Most Executives Are Missing It.
Every executive reading this has a communication stack: email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, LinkedIn messages, Zoom invites. What almost none of them have is a daily phone call. Americans send more than 2 trillion text messages annually. US smartphone users communicate via...
I grew up in Italy. This one word changed how I negotiate, lead, and live.
I have lived in forty countries. I have sat in boardrooms from Beirut to Boulder, coached executives on five continents, and watched deals close and collapse across cultures I spent years learning to read. And the single most useful thing I carry from my years growing...
The Accidental Drink That Explains Why Italy Will Always Be Competitive
In 1968, a barista at Bar Basso in Milan reached for the gin and grabbed Prosecco by error. He made the drink, served it, and called it sbagliato. Wrong. The client drank it. Came back for another asking un altro giro (another round). The mistake never left the menu,...