We were waiting for spring and it's almost summer, that's how we live: so early that we are late. The vicious circle of time, of our lives, of our work.
This cuspid issue, straddling two seasons, has absorbed moods and loves and come out as a collage where art invades the neighbourhoods and makes bread, as natural as biodynamic, as fragrant as food that is all-round good, as inebriating as a prize-winning Negroni.
We wanted to talk about rebirth and we ran into a thousand rivulets: this 2022 that wants to makeup for all the time spent closed, opening up.
By the way, we are looking for people in London who know our job and want to be reborn in London. But why do I get asked more often "man or woman" and not "what kind of staff"? I was reading recently: it is said that there are fewer women at the head of the companies because of their "lackof assertiveness" (breath).
But is assertiveness a competence? I looked up various studies on Linkedin - Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Istat, Journal of Applied Psychology - according to which, if anything, women have a more realistic perception of themselves and therefore constantly question themselves.
Here, I am already at ease. But isn't questioning a talent? In the meantime, however, I am reflecting on my role and, incidentally but not excessively, on the so-called female quotas, and I am certain that it is never wrong to work on skills: assertiveness, which is not based on solid know-how, is useless.
And this is the opinion of someone who, for example, at a certain point, chose not to study because she had to do something else. One who has had the chance of having competent, knowledgeable and loving people beside her, who have not "helped" me but have shared with me a long and gradual path enough to learn as I go along. Perception, skills: I just worked better at other things.
And for each of my "I can't do it" I could cite at least ten voices in support.
This is how I manage: I have learned. This is through my own story, that of my husband, my children, our collaborators. People with whom the relationship is a factual, productive, healthy, collaborative.
I don't know if I am assertive, I am empathic: and that is risky.
Identifying with others makes me less direct - and then I snap, I know, everyone knows, I snap when I see that I can't ask for exactly what I want - and then there's a third part of the empathy story and that's what keeps me close to the people I work with.
Writing inventories, discussing with suppliers, jumping on a plane twice a week, but always, always, in the field and never in the control room. Always on the side of the people, never on the side of the numbers. Responsibility is not delegating and running away, it is taking charge and staying.
This is how I am reborn, every day, in the awareness of my good luck and the desire to keep it, multiply it and share it.
This is how we choose the 'top' and all the other roles here: for what they can do.
So the issue is not "male or female", but "willpower or no willpower".
Because we may be born, male or female or whatever, but then, from the moment we are born onwards, we are born again every day, with every choice we make, aren’t we?
