Ferrari: Italian Manager in China

What is your biggest challenge, as an Italian leader, in China?

I’ve been in Asia for several years and, I think, it’s a simple thing. But as with all simple things, it’s probably the most complicated one. My daily challenge is to be sure, together with my managers, that we are heading towards the same understanding, that we are looking at things with the same glasses. Sometimes, you have a meeting, you discuss, you apparently agree; you understand me and I understand you and you take it for granted. I can tell you, most of the time, it’s not like that. We discuss, we have an agreement. You understood A; I understood B. We are totally convinced that we have the same understanding but we don’t.

My main challenge, most of the time, is just to be sure that we have the same understanding, we are on the same page and that we understand each other and we are going in the same direction. This is true every time you are dealing with huge cultural differences. In the past, I have been in charge of Japan and Indonesia and I’ve often worked with Korea. Every Asian country is a bit different from each other, but they all come from Confucianism, so they are really coming from a different place. We come from the Greek culture in Europe and they come from Confucianism, most of the Chinese. You are really putting two different worlds together. Without being too philosophical, if you are not 100% aware of this, the risk that you are convinced that everybody understood and, in fact, nobody understood, is a big problem. It could be a huge problem, in partnership, in managing, in private life; in all aspects.

So the big effort is to be able to have everyone who has their own mechanism, to be sure that you always double-check that everyone is on the same page. This is easy to say and very complex to do. But once you do it, you have, I think, in China, the best people you can find, because they are very determined and very eager to accomplish. They are hard workers, who don’t spare anything. The assumption is that you must have the personal tools that you develop both by studying and with experience on the field, to be able to have your checking system, all the time. The cockpit must always be on. If you switch off the cockpit and you think, okay, auto-pilot, sometimes you crash.