“On Sunday we won the Europeans, because our kids weren’t satisfied. They were looking for victory, excellence, because they knew the competition would be fair and they believed in it. Unfortunately in Italy this rarely happens: the merit is reduced to the minimum wage, familism, patronage and corruption prevail, the rules are often rigged and therefore there is no drive to excel ”. He said it Roger Abravanel, director emeritus of McKinsey, essayist and president of the Insead Council Italy, in his lectio magistralis during the Festival “Out of Class Masters – TraversaMenti” in Vasto, in Abruzzo.
“Mancini he was chosen to lead this national team not by inheritance or surname – continued the business consulting guru, author of ‘Aristocrazia 2.0, the ruling class that serves Italy’ – but he passed a tough selection. We, on the other hand, have a private economy in the hands of an aristocracy that hands down companies from father to son. An elite selected for merit is missing. But in the face of the ICT and knowledge economy, we risk stagnating. The Recovery plan will not be enough, which is also important. These 200 billion will not be enough if companies do not invest, they do not create excellence, they do not have the right people “. Abravanel then concluded: “We have to take advantage of the opportunity of Pnrr to attract international capital to help us grow the best companies. Then we need to bring out two or three universities of excellence in research and finally we need to make the performance of our judiciary more transparent ”.
The anthropologist Adriano Favole, in the other lectio magistralis of the day within the review, he instead reflected on culture as a “symbolic horizon that unites us to others”. And in his speech, starting from travel stories and ethnographic experiences, he explained how “both in ours and in other societies there are many ways of leaving one’s own culture. From initiation rites to theater, from irony to play, from travel to environmental crises (such as the pandemic in progress), many paths allow human beings to exploit the porosity of cultural boundaries “.