"If you think about it, at work but also in sport or in normal life, when you enter a comfort zone it means that you are not fighting, you sit down. For many people, this is a good thing. I am, on the other hand, someone who has never let himself be, the comfort zone really annoys me".
Photographic material provided by Luca Piccinini
Thinking of doing an interview with Luca is a feat in itself: Luca is a man in constant movement, mentally, physically and in his life journey.
Being able to paint his portrait through writing, is difficult: it lacks all the emotion and energy that he is able to convey with his way of interacting with people.
However, reading his words, you can feel his joy for a full life and experience his creative way of breaking the mold, enlivening even the most stormy situations, with great determination and willpower, gratitude and courage.
Luca is a company man, an eternal problem solver, a far-sighted family man, a courageous knight (on horseback and in life), a practical creative (in his own way) and a reliable friend.
And so, a few weeks ago, as good friends, we chatted freely, addressing various topics also linked to current life: from the difficulties of personal growth to the challenges of the world of work.
It's a motivating interview, fast-paced, full of ideas and worth reading in one go!
Table of Contents
“BEING AWAKE” and MUCH WILLING TO FIGHT IN LIFE
Luca, what can I say, just seeing you to do this interview has put me in a good mood and, knowing you, I'm preparing to smile!
<<It's a reassuring premise!>>
I would say that the starting point for warming up is precisely your way of being: a person in constant movement, excited and enthusiastic every day, from when you get up in the morning until you hit the bed in the evening!
It's been at least ten years since I met you and you're still like this. What's your secret?
<<The passion for what I do. I always do it to the fullest because I basically like what I do: from sport, to my working life, to anything else I can do, my passion for horses, for example. I do things because I enjoy it. Having fun, I always put the utmost passion into it.>>
There are many fascinating and inspiring aspects about you which we will cover shortly.
First, however, I would like to open a parenthesis on how your adventure began, because those who don't know your story might not believe it!
You grew up alone, you lost your father very early in the nineties. To support yourself you started racing horses. At the same time you joined Fashion Spa, where starting from the position of warehouse worker, in just two years, you became logistics manager of the branches in Northern Italy, at just 22 years old.
But how did you get there?
<<My adventure began when I lost my father. I had just returned from military service and enrolled at university for engineering, and after a short time my father fell ill with cancer. I followed my father through his illness for a short period, but when he died I found myself with debts on the house that he hadn't yet finished paying off.
I had to wake up quickly and I said okay come on, as they say "let's learn to roll up our sleeves even when we're in a tank top", and so I took the first job that I came across: a methane station near my house. It was my first job, in a small reality, and they made me work a few hours, while I needed money to pay off debts.
In the meantime I started doing show jumping on horseback, partly a passion, partly a way to supplement my income. Thanks to this passion, I met Bassi Gianpaolo, owner of a prestigious show jumping stable, who, seeing me as a smart boy, started making me go to his stable, because he needed someone to ride his horses. Gianpaolo was also a transporter for Fashion Spa.
And here comes the beautiful part and the never-expected coincidence!
At the same time, in fact, Count Adelchi Amilcare Carlotto and Marta Marzotto, old university friends at the time, had begun to lay the foundations of what would be one of the first innovations in fashion logistics. On the one hand, the Count, as an entrepreneur, had had an important vision: he had already understood before the 1990s that being a landowner and renting his field and then taking a percentage of the harvest was an obsolete mentality, it did not mean doing entrepreneurship. He then started selling the land and building warehouses. On the other hand Marta Marzotto knew the most important fashion brands well from Armani to Versace, Gucci etc. and he also knew that at the time there was no specific logistics company dedicated to high fashion. Like good former university classmates, they said to each other: I have the contacts, you have the warehouses, together let's create a logistics network exclusively for clothing! And not just any clothing, but from the most important brands. Their feat was immediately noticed and the first to request this service were the manufacturers of the North and therefore Marina Rinaldi first and the second was Armani. Having created the warehouses in those years, they were obviously looking for new staff.
Here we connect our dots!
After some time, in fact, while I continued to do everything between the horses and the odd jobs to repay the house, Bassi Gianpaolo, the transporter, came back to me simply saying: "look I need someone smart there in the Fashion Spa branch, because we are starting a new adventure to create a company specialising in the distribution of high-end clothing.".
So… here I am!
So I entered that world as a warehouse worker. When the branch manager of the Bologna center was absent for a long period due to a family problem, I became the manager in his place, again for this issue of being "awake". He, Mr Maurizio Mengozzi, had in fact said directly to the Fashion managers: "look, Luca is very reliable and capable, I propose him as my deputy even if he is very young." And I accepted, because I needed money, even though I was very young and could only count on my head and my ability.
This was only after six months as a warehouse worker.
So first from a warehouse worker, I became deputy branch manager in the logistics center of Bologna and then they gave me the opportunity to move up, again thanks to having demonstrated that I was "awake" and ready to seize the right occasions.
I'll also tell you the second part to get to Milan. Fashion businesses had developed in size and territory, and in the meantime Adriano Aondio, who was responsible for the Milan branch, the most important branch in that period because Milan was the fashion capital, had to retire. So I and three other candidates went to Milan and Mr. Adriano chose the ideal candidate who was to be his successor. After six months, when they saw the data from the Bologna branch that had improved under my management, Adriano Aondio met with Marta Marzotto and Count Adelchi and gave my name.
From there onwards, there was a turning point: therefore I started as a warehouse worker, deputy branch manager in Bologna, and then there, as manager of the Lombardy branch and then of the area branches Northern Italy in the following years.>>
Unexpected, continuous growth, driven first by economic necessity and then by your determination.
Allow me a question: what did the boy who more than forty years ago, at 20 years old, had to make do and learn to grow, feel starting from scratch?
<<Look, my dad didn't think he'd die at fifty; therefore, he had left me with a lot of debt. But this was “my chance”: the loss of a parent gives you the chance to understand many things when you are young. I took it very badly when it happened, because when you lose a parent, you lose a fundamental point of reference.
However, my father had also left me an important and strong message.
Keep in mind that, even if for a few months, I experienced all of my father's illness. I always accompanied him to the oncology center in Ravenna. One day I told him: “look dad, it's not fair, you're so young”. He took me to the first floor of the oncology center, where the children were and said to me: “See? They are children, but I am fifty years old. They are not even given the opportunity to experience a minimum of what their growth path could be. They won't even be able to become adults. My boy, I never taught you that life is fair, I always told you that it is hard, that it is a war and that you have to fight to the end."
I had the example of my father who did not give in to his illness, he lived it until the end suffering, but with his head held high, and at the same time he showed me who had to learn with the pain too. He suffered, I would have suffered too, but it's part of the game.
Suffering, in life, every now and then, is also good.
Our elders were wiser: they said in life what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And this phrase, which I haven't heard much lately, is a great truth.
As my father always told me, you learn more in life from your mistakes than from your successes.
From there I said: “it happened, ok, now we fight”.
Both my father and my grandfather had always taught me that in life you have to fight. It doesn't matter if you win or lose, the important thing is to accept the challenge.
I was twenty years old and I reacted in my own way, because then, we all react to these events differently.
You see, some things that happen to you, later on in life, remain imprinted on you, because they are the ones on which you focus your growth. They remain imprinted on you and you say “from this point I have to learn something : if I don't learn it now I'll forget it;" so, I'll learn it now and take it with me on my journey.
And I started with this path.>>
A LIFE ON HORSE
Horses entered your life very early. First a means to support yourself at a young age, today a passion you can't do without. You constantly take care of it, you know its darkest points, but also its most pleasant traits. From training a stallion to raising a foal, to training budding winners for jumping competitions, to taking care of injured horses, to accompanying them to a second life so as not to send them to slaughter. A world apart, which you follow in your free time and which deserves to be told, because talking to you about horses is a bit like leafing through an encyclopedia. More than a passion, it seems like a part of you, what binds you so much to this animal?
<<Caprilli, one of the first who began to really ask himself what the horse is, responded to those who stated that riding a horse is a sport, saying that "riding a horse is not a sport, it's a lifestyle."
Napoleon Bonaparte, when asked how many types of people there were in the world, replied: "only two, those who ride horses and those who don't".
The beauty of the horse is that he doesn't know if you are a king, if you are a beggar, if you are beautiful or ugly, he only understands if you have a fearless heart or not.
The horse is an animal that expresses everything I like. He has heart first and foremost: consider that a horse blows his heart out in the race just to give everything for you. It has elegance and power. It is the only animal in the world that has three gaits, three different ways of moving on this planet. It is the animal that led us to evolution: before the internal combustion engine we only had a horse to move.
I like him for these qualities.
It is not an animal for everyone. The horse doesn't have an owner, to give you an example, it's not like a dog. The horse recognizes a leader, he continually wants to feel that you are a leader, because he only follows a leader. He doesn't understand that you are his master. It is an animal that you have to conquer every time you see it. That's why I like it. Because every time it is a new challenge.
You don't do sport alone in this case, you do it together and, the stronger this combination between you and him, the more results you will have.
I have seen many mediocre riders who however managed to have a strong feeling with their horse and vice versa, even a less than excellent horse in full bond with his rider, managed to have important performances, thanks to this synergy between rider and horse. And you don't create it like that, it has to be a single movement, it has to be a single thing. It's not that easy and you learn that over the years, you will never find a show jumping world champion at twenty years of age: you have the greatest results after many years, because it is the experience, it is the fact of understanding how to enter into synergy with him and being able to exploit even the defects that the animal has, that makes the difference.
Many are afraid and it is reasonable to be afraid, it is a dangerous animal, but it is beautiful.>>
GETTING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE and THE HUMILITY OF KNOWING to LEARN
Let's get to work and your professional career. It seems like a story from a movie. From a novice warehouse worker in 1994 in Fashion Spa you became Lombardy Branch Manager. After seven years you moved from fashion to a completely different product sector: you arrived at Bonduelle and become Logistics and Supply Chain Manager. From there, after eleven years, you changed product sectors again, to Giuseppe Citterio Spa, where in addition to everything else, you are also entrusted with the management of three new packaging lines. After another ten years you arrived at McGarlet Spa, you returned to the fruit sector, with a management role: Plant Manager. Passion, great willpower and charisma have brought you this far. What is the necessary ingredient to not give up even one day in these thirty years of working at such a high and ever-evolving pace?
<<I went from Fashion to the very fresh with Bonduelle, because for me it was a challenge.
Keep in mind that when you make clothing you have warehouses with very large sizes, very tight periods for distributing the clothing and very calm periods where you store the product in an orderly manner. What does orderly mean? It means that you have to plan very well where to store the product, because processing must be very fast when the order arrives; therefore, you have to study the routes carefully and where to do it with enormous sizes and processing times of three or four days, because the clothing does not go bad, it stays in your warehouse for three or four months and then it must be processed quickly. In Bonduelle, starting from what I told you were the main difficulties of my first assignment, I instead had to enter a completely different world.
The challenge was this: I wanted to understand if I was able to move from a Spa company, Fashion, to a much larger company, a multinational with 14,800 employees with flows completely different and much faster logistics: let's talk about fruit. I wanted to see if I could quickly pivot to a completely different world from a business management and logistics perspective.
Giuseppe Citterio was still different. Do you think that before going to Citterio those from "Dimmidisì" had looked for me, but if I had gone to that company - a beautiful company - what would I have learned? They were smaller than Bonduelle, they would have paid me much more, it's true, they would have drawn from me, but what would I have learned from them? Nothing.
So I preferred to move into an even more challenging world. Everyone told me: very fresh food is tough, but meat is worse. So let's move into the flesh! Let's see if we can do it there too. It is always a challenge to see if you are able to change, change quickly, improve the situation you have found, learn and improve. It depends on who you are as a person. I like challenges.>>
Even over such a long period?
<<I reflect a lot on the words spoken by Marchionne in an interview many years ago.
He often expressed a concept that I then made my own: the fact of the comfort zone.
If you think about it, at work but also in sport or in normal life, when you enter a comfort zone it means that you are not fighting, you sit down. For many people, this is a good thing. I am, on the other hand, someone who has never let myself be, the comfort zone really annoys me. No one ever kicked me out of the companies where I worked, but for me it was no longer stimulating, it was always the same, I no longer had fun. It was a comfort zone.
I can't stay in a comfort zone. I already know that where I am now, where I am following a new plant, I will never be in a comfort zone between now and the next five years. And this is inspiring for me. It means that I constantly have to think and fight.
Then someone can tell you that you're crazy and they would probably be right too!>>
What was the most important thing in your professional growth path?
<<When you are young and undertake certain roles, it is also important to follow the advice of those who have more experience than you. From him or her, you can learn a lot. You must have the humility to recognize that you are in a position where you have to be a sponge and you can do it because you are young. But if on the other side you don't understand that the person in front of you is your water, it becomes a problem.
I was lucky because I had Maurizio Mengozzi first to teach me and then I became better than him. But he taught me. If I hadn't had him teaching me I wouldn't have become better. After him I had Adriano Aondio. Bear in mind that he had been the director of Cisalfa before moving to Fashion, not exactly the first person to pass by on the street in those years. Then I learned from the CEO of Bonduelle, he taught me a lot.
I was enchanted by these people.
You have to understand when it's time for you to be a sponge and they are your water, you don't have to close yourself off mentally, you have to stay open. I always thought within myself one thing: if I learn from him who has all this experience, I don't make my own trials and errors, or at least I minimize them and learn from him, my learning path will be much shorter.
The other important thing is to recognize who is in front of you.
I'll tell you an anecdote to make you understand. During my experience at Citterio I was already a McGarlet consultant and for me he was the best there. When I met Luca Garletti, in 2012, he said that avocado was the future and everyone laughed. I looked, however, at this man fascinated, and said: in my opinion this man here is someone who sees ahead. When you started importing ginger and avocado in 2012 everyone laughed, now where can't you find these products?
Recognizing the entrepreneur is also important. Anyone who does my job is essentially a technician. You know that you will never be an entrepreneur because you are a technician, but you have to know how to recognize the entrepreneur and I did it with Luca.>>
THE SACRIFICES OF A PARENT FOR THE FUTURE OF THEIR CHILDREN
In addition to horses and work, there is more in your life: you are also a husband and father. I imagine that reconciling the daily demands that your role imposes on you and a family life is not so simple. How difficult is it to manage your work life balance?
<<Very much.
As for my wife, I am actually very lucky, because being an accountant and having seen a corporate life, let's say that at least she can understand that there are intense periods and that you can't always be as present as you would like.
For my daughter, however, I have made a change in recent years. I wasn't always present, it's true. Even if it is not a justification, what has guided me over the years has been the thought for her future and, like many other parents who come from an economically unhappy past, I have always said to myself "I am making a great sacrifice so that one day my daughter won't have to make the life of sacrifice that I did."
Today I don't know if I did that well.
In my opinion I made an error of judgment, because in the end I understood that difficult paths are those that create strong people. Difficult life forces you to wake up immediately. When a traumatic event happens to you at a young age, such as the loss of a parent that leaves you in financial difficulty, you wake up. It's like waking up suddenly. First you planned in your head: I'll go to university then afterwards I'll find a nice job nearby, a peaceful life, I have the support of my father, I can go to university calmly without having to make any sacrifices. But no, it doesn't go like that, everything changes suddenly.
Anyway, returning to your question: reconciling family life with a job as a manager is difficult, whether you are a man or a woman. Not only because you have many responsibilities, but also because you implicitly require sacrifices from those close to you, even to your own detriment.
Because let's be clear, the first one to lose is me. But I made my choice, but for those around me it's not a choice, it's an implicit obligation for me, and I realize that it's not correct. I'm telling you clearly that this is not correct.>>
Maybe it won't always be like this.
<<I hope so.>>
THE IMPORTANCE OF SPORT
You have always been sporty and have always taken care of the functional aspect of your body, with nutrition and training. How important is this aspect for you?
<<It's very important to me. The path of sport has been for me, like all my life, an evolving path.
I went from competing, both on horseback and Muay Thai competitions, to a purely aesthetic aspect of weight lifting in the gym for a few years. Then, in evolution, I understood that what our ancient Romans said, “Mens sana in corpore sano”, was correct. I learned to listen to my body and behave accordingly. Today I train properly, no longer at the levels I used to, because I understand that I can't do it physically anymore.
As you often say, it's about feeling good.
Training makes me feel good, because I release tension. We all need to have an outlet. I don't do it for aesthetic reasons but for well-being. If I'm tense I do aerobics, but not because I want to burn fat, but because at that moment I need that to unwind because the weights aren't enough for me. I also have the bag in the garage. Too tense? Sack. To avoid tension, I use weights instead. I do the workouts that make me feel good and that keep me active.
Furthermore, if you want to be mentally efficient you must also have an efficient body, because if you have physical-related health problems they inevitably also affect your head and your thoughts.>>
THE AFTER
Retirement is far away... but I don't think talking to you about it even makes sense. Beyond work, horses, personal life, your inner drive, your experience of work and personal life, I believe will need to result in the realization of something. Do you ever think about it?
<<I always think about it and I've already planned what's next!
I bought some land. Because I said: "I can't stand still, I have a great passion for horses and I wasn't lucky enough for it to become my profession, but when I retire, I will certainly be able to dedicate much more time to it". I would like to manage mares with foals. Then put the foals with their mothers in the land that I bought, because it is important that they play together from an early age. This is what I will do when I retire. I won't have the physicality of before, but I will have a lot of experience. In this case I need less physicality and more experience: I do something I like and resonate with.
Imagine I didn't plan this!>>
THE COUNCIL
Can you leave me some advice for anyone who will read this piece?
<<I always tell my daughter too: not to be afraid of making mistakes, because in life you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. There's no point in beating yourself up because someone made a mistake, you need to learn from that mistake.>>
The interview with Luca was a real charge of energy: I found myself in many of his words and from them I gathered lessons to understand aspects of my daily life that I have always neglected.
Luca's portrait ends here for today, but we don't know what the future may hold…
Don't miss the next blog article: subscribe to the newsletter!
You can find the registration form at the bottom of this page!
BIOGRAPHY of Luca Piccinini
Luca Piccinini, born in 1971.
He grew up in Emilia-Romagna, his native region, where after losing his father at the age of twenty, he left university to start working and pay off the family debts.
At first, he rode horses for show jumping competitions and trains and fights for Muay Thai competitions.
Then in 1994 he joined Fashion Spa as a warehouse worker, where within two years he became Lombardy Branch Manager. In 2001 he joined Bonduelle as Logistics and Supply Chain Manager. From there, after eleven years, he changed product sector again, joining Giuseppe Citterio Spa in the same role in 2013.
In 2017, he arrived at McGarlet Spa, where he held the role of Plant Manager.
In his free time, he follows various horses, from foals to stallions, in different stables, and for the future he has a special project in this area!
Passion for life, great willpower and enthusiasm for new things characterize his daily life.