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 Ten Words That Get You Treated Like Family in Italy
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 to them the way you wait at airport security. Ten minutes go by,...
Dolce Far Niente: The Productivity Secret Italy Never Called Productivity
Doing nothing, on purpose, is a skill the rest of us forgot 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...
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...
When Billions Became Trillions
Ten years ago, technology corporations spoke a common language: unicorns and billion-dollar valuations. Reaching a billion-dollar valuation was an impressive milestone. Entrepreneurs and VC alike talked about 10X growth and when you joined the Unicorn club, you were...
Italy’s Giant Takes Flight: Building the World’s Largest Plane
In the age of miniaturization and microchips, Italy has decided to go big, very big. The country’s aerospace industry is helping build what will soon become the largest aircraft ever constructed, a machine so vast it could carry entire wind turbine blades inside its...
From Earth to Orbit: Jeff Bezos Envisions Data Centers in Space
The rapidly growing energy needs generated by the artificial intelligence (AI) is pushing data centers to the edge, literally. Today, hyperscale GPU clusters consume huge amounts of electricity and water, causing widespread local resistance and environmental concerns....
The Italian Advantage: Why Kindness Is Still a Power Move
In an age of outrage, snark, and speed, kindness can feel like pointless, or worse, a liability. But in Italy and increasingly across the corporate world, it’s still seen as a form of strength. The ability to stay calm, warm, and courteous, especially under pressure,...