A Sicilian in Asia: the story? of? Antonio, a globe-trotter HR Manager

by Gaetano Bonfissuto

in Cronache da un altro Mondo, News

10.30 pm in China, 3.30 pm on Ivrea’s meridian, I’m with my friend Antonio Calco’ Labruzzo, from Palermo now living in China (Shanghai) for Coesia. He's just finished a work dinner, they didn’t drink too much and Skype is keeping its end of the deal.

Short personal notes: born in 1982, Master degree in Economy at Bocconi University (Milan); while most of his classmates specialized in marketing and finance, Antonio believed that Human Resources were the most interesting part of the business.

To leverage the human capital was more sustainable and closer to his aspirations. So he decided to start his career.

How did you start your career?

I started in L’Oréal; when I was at the second to last year of my university I went to a career day at Bocconi. I prepared a CV, I selected 5 companies that were interesting for me and all of them were in the fast moving consumer goods area.

L’Oréal called me straight away for a post in the HR department, an internship at the beginning. It was an immediate feeling and we chose each other right away. I dealt with recruiting. I had a different idea of the HR department, I thought more at the organizational aspects. I had the best teacher I could hope for; Paola Boromei, and I worked in that great team built by Gianluca Ventura.

After L’Oréal how did you move to GE and Vodafone?

In GE there was a wonderful organizational and cultural change project; moreover I had the chance to attend a Postgraduate Master in Human Resources at MIP (Milan’s Polytechnic). I was there for about one year, again dealing with recruitment but also the soft aspects of HR. In addition, I managed the change management project and thanks to that I learned some of the most advanced tools and processes.

Then one night, after he moved from L’Oréal to Vodafone, Gianluca Ventura called me and sent me to Rome with the role of HR Business Partner for the centre of Italy.

Which differences did you perceive among these three multinationals?

Going back to the first steps of my career, 50% was instinct and 50% was from a clear developmental strategy. I moved from L’Oréal, the unstructured company par excellence, to GE that is exactly the opposite: completely structured. Vodafone was in a developing phase instead, there was a lot to do. Here I managed the HR cycle at 360 degrees, Employee Relations and Trade Unions Management included.

What did these first experiences give you in terms of professional skills?

They taught me how to use different levers, to select the right tools within my toolbox, that change in attitude is crucial, that there exist al lot of points of views and that you can be an HR in several different ways. They teach me to be flexible and to interact with different managerial cultures.

At the beginning it seems to me that your career growth was linked to Gianluca Ventura’s one: how did you move to Heinz?

At a certain stage I realized that I had to deepen my specialty knowledge in order to stock up my toolbox; a headhunter called me and told me about a very interesting project: a multinational company that gave autonomy at local level. Indeed Vodafone was centralizing a lot in the UK. In Italy Heinz is basically Plasmon, baby food. I had a broad span of autonomy. Here I had the chance to review the processes and then put it in practice. I dealt with: recruitment (that I re-engineered as process, making it more efficient), performance management (another area that I changed), training and development. Obviously I had the support of external consultants and a strong sponsorship from my bosses.

After the first years and the good projects results, they asked me to take the responsibility for one of the plants, the one in Parma; there I had the good fortune to be in contact with a great human side of the company, the human value of the people I met and what they taught me brought me back to the ground in contact with the company’s roots and values.

How did you enter Coesia, which is a quite different industry compared to the others?

In Heinz I was feeling that a cycle was coming to an end and in addition I wanted to have an international experience. Like at the beginning I wanted to broaden my horizons again, also through a different industry. Always with the contacts coming from a head hunter, I was introduced to an extraordinary project, again a cultural change: Coesia’s one that decided to move from being a confederation of companies in order to become a real multinational group through 5 clear strategic initiatives, one of which was right to leverage on people talents, that was entrusted to me.

How did you end up in Asia?

It started almost as a joke, I spoke about it with my boss when we were in China for an event that sealed the end of the first cycle. As it happens with love at first sight, we didn’t have to go into many details and after a few weeks an organizational announcement was made in order to formalize my new role as Head of the macro-region Asia and Australia, based in China.

How are you in China? What are the main differences between Italy and China?

I have been here for two years but I travel a lot managing 15 plants and 9 head offices in such a vast area in terms of geographical extension and cultures such as Asia, Australia and Japan are.

What I understand about this part of the world, and about China specifically, is that it is not easy to understand it. From Europe we tend to consider it as one country, but inside of it there are thousands of shades and huge differences with western culture.

From a human perspective I learned to understand before evaluating; at the beginning it’s difficult to communicate with the Chinese, not because they don’t speak English but because we both give different meanings to the same words.

I was used to asking people : How are you? They always said to me: not bad

For me it has a positive meaning because there is a strong negation, for them it has a negative meaning instead because in the answer there is a word like “bad”. Moreover I’m studying mandarin; in their language for example the future is grammatically in the end because you don’t know it yet, you cannot see it. On the other hand the past is in front, because you know it already so you can see it. For us from Europe it is exactly the opposite and if you don’t stop in order to pay attention and know their culture, you’ll never find a contact point, nevertheless you’ll understand.

What do you miss from Italy? The food?

No, I like Chinese food. I miss family and friends and I miss the practicality. Here to do anything you need a lot of time. Distances are massive. For everything you need a lot of time. Furthermore everything I do here is new, it’s missing the experience process. They built the skyscrapers after the shacks , jumping the intermediate stages.

What do Chinese people have more than us?

The smile. Because they look at the future with optimism. What probably we had in Italy during the 60’s.

What about the pollution?

It depends on where, in Beijing of course it’s a huge problem, but it’s not everywhere the same. They are doing their thing as we did after the 60’s when we had the industrial boom. Obviously, as everything, here the scale is bigger and that is valid also for the pollution.

What about democracy in China?

Here there isn’t our concept of democracy, once they asked me if I knew the meaning of voting, if I ever had the chance to do it. Obviously for me this is unacceptable but for the time being here it’s okay. On the other hand I think it is a fragile equilibrium which is bound to change.

I can give you an example, Hong Kong’s protests didn’t arrive here, communications are filtered. Freedom as we consider it doesn’t exist, I read international on-line newspapers, but Chinese people cannot because it’s needed a VPN and theoretically they are not allowed to have it.

And from a professional point of view?

Professionally here I have the chance to see a growing business in a fast developing context, something that in Italy is quite uncommon now.

Different and various skills are required. A lot of practicality because quite often it’s needed to start from scratch, but always with an eye to long term sustainability. Also because here everything is so fast that future arrives earlier. Right, here also the speed of execution is crucial.

The most common error instead is to start from the arrogance of having more knowledge and for that reason not to open enough your mind in order to understand local differences and specificities; losing in that way their huge value.

Synthetically?

It's very difficult to be synthetic now, maybe I’ll be able to in the future. But I’d like to share with you another thing I learned living here in Asia. Travelling doesn’t mean itself that you’ll open your mind. In order to do that, you need to be curious, unload your luggage from preconceived ideas and put in a lot of effort in order to understand something that is extremely difficult to penetrate: a different culture. Among the many tools I added to my toolbox in the last two years, this is the one I’m most proud of.