Cristina Scocchia | "The courage to try" |

So, first of all, good afternoon and thank you all for this beautiful invitation. The question is a rather complex question, I could answer for hours, but to answer we must start from Coldirodi. Who among you knows Coldirodi? Raise your hand. Well, one person, one person I have. Usually there is never anyone, so already here it's a different situation. Coldirodi is a small town of 2,000 souls near Sanremo. In Coldirodi there is the elementary school, the middle school, two grocery stores, and a newsstand. So when on the weekend you want a dose of life, you choose to go to the newsstand, to go shopping. And here ends the great dose of life of Coldirodi. Well, I was born in this small town which is a bit of a small ancient world, from two normal parents. My mother was a kindergarten teacher, my father taught technical education, so not even one of the most famous, prestigious subjects. And on top of that, I was born a woman, which, let's say, is not exactly a career accelerator, especially in our country. But I had this dream, I had the dream of becoming a CEO and I must say when...

Yes, yes, I even said if I would do economics, if I would choose economics because I was a bit undecided with medicine, I want to become a CEO and the reaction of people was a bit like the reaction you have with the village idiot, that is, when you ask children, 'Hello little one, what do you want to be when you grow up?' the firefighter, the astronaut. I answer, 'I want to become a CEO' and so they looked at me condescendingly, like saying, 'Pat, you'll never make it.' The only one who didn't believe I would make it, but who never put me down, was my father. And my father was truly a gift because as long as I was in my small ancient world, Coldirodi, everything was fine because we were all the same. When I then went down to Sanremo and getting to Sanremo was already a journey, you took the bus at 7:00 in the morning, an hour to get there, it seemed like Heidi coming down from the mountains and when I went to high school in Sanremo for the first time, I realized that life wasn't like the one I lived in Coldirodi. There were boys who dressed better than me, who could afford the fashion of the time. There were boys who already knew French and English because they could afford to go abroad. And for the first time I got really angry and I remember coming home and saying, 'But I didn't want to be born rich, but not poor either, there was a good middle ground, right, Dad?' And he told me, and this is a great gift, he told me, 'Look, see that hill? You can spend your life complaining that you weren't born at the top of the hill. You can spend your life complaining that someone was born there, that someone will go there by helicopter, that someone will go there with a driver and you'll be right, but you'll spend your life grumbling, as they say in Liguria, you'll spend your life complaining, or you can hold your breath, you can hold your energy and you can start running. Run today, run tomorrow, maybe you'll even get to the top of that hill and if you don't make it, you won't have failed, because in life it doesn't take the courage to succeed, it takes the courage to try.' And here then the title of the book was born, and so I said it's true, I must not let anger win. Anger, hunger must become a positive force, not destructive, they must not turn into social envy, they must turn into blind determination, into that strong, strong will that then, well, guided me for my whole life. And so as part of this will, always will, very strong will, I asked myself what is the best university and everyone said it was Bocconi, but Bocconi was in Milan and Milan was too dangerous, too big and above all too expensive for my family because the aunt, as she calls herself, was convenient because she would host us, obviously it was easier, right? with the aunt who already had the house, who already provided you with food and lodging and so for the family it was a matter of security, but also an economic matter, but I felt that the opportunities that Bocconi would open for me, Turin could not give me. Right or wrong because you never know in life, but I absolutely wanted it. And so for the first time I did something I didn't think I would do, that is, I stood my ground with my father. I believe you can tell from the tone of my voice how much I loved my dad. Yet in that moment I said no, I said, 'Dad, this is my life and I have to go to Milan.' And for almost 6 months, 6 months is a lot, we didn't speak to each other, we had some beautiful scenes because it was me, my father and my mother at dinner and I said, 'I don't know, Mom, pass this thing to your husband' and she, my father said, 'Pass this thing to your daughter.' It was really ridiculous, but we kept the silence for months, and then one evening I was in the attic, like in the movies and I said, 'Listen, I'm going to Milan with or without their approval, I will go, but I can't continue not to hug the person I love most in the world.' And so I said, 'Okay, now I'll go down, I won't give him reason, but I'll go down and hug him.' And in that moment he thought the same thing. So I met him halfway up the stairs, we started crying, we couldn't say anything, we hugged, it was one of the most beautiful hugs of my life, I still remember it with emotion and he told me: 'Of course, you don't lack determination.' In these months I tried everything, from anger to rage and he didn't use this word towards you, but deep down I'm proud of you. Go to Milan, the savings will last 2 years, the university lasts 5, you'll find a job and you'll support yourself, which is what happened.

But I must say I owe a lot to my dad because then his attitude, I always remember that he told me, 'But look Cristina, I know that no one cares about technical education. I know that students in my classes do the most important homework, in fact they copy the most important homework from other subjects.' He says, 'But I don't care because I don't want to teach them technical education, I want them to find their place in the world. I want them to understand what their dream is and what they need to put in motion to achieve it.' And you understand? Having a father like that is a divine gift. It's true that we had problems making ends meet, but I always had someone who taught me something more important, that is, he taught me that the starting point cannot define who you are or who you want to become and this is a gift because then I fought, I fell, I scraped my knees, but I knew that if I gave it my all, I could achieve what I had identified as my dream.

So, first of all, I would like to make some clarifications because said like this I sound really arrogant. So, you put yourselves in my shoes, right? I go to this career day really against my will. There was this friend of mine Sonia who cared, I said, 'Okay, come on Sonia, let's go.' After that I remain truly struck because they talk about talent, merit, social mobility. I said these people are talking to me, they are not talking to all of us, they are really talking to me, they are my people. I run home, I write the resume, what do you put in a resume at 20 years old? The Boy Scouts, the experience as a volunteer with the Red Cross, the great desire I had and nothing more because at 20 you have nothing else. I send the resume the next morning without even going through the university and for a year they don't answer me. A year? And I thought, okay, it's the first of many slaps I've taken, I'll put it together with all the others. Instead, after a year they summon me to take a test. I take this written test and believe me, that day they could have cut off an arm. I was so focused that I gave 200%. I felt it was my train that I couldn't miss. I pass this test and they summon me for the oral. And when I wrote the resume, I must tell the truth, I told a little lie. Because they had said English doesn't matter, we'll teach it to you, but you know how they say? Trust is good, not trusting is much better. I at least put a good grade in my English and instead I didn't speak a word. And who do I get? In Rome, eh, that is, not in Sininati or garlic, no, in Rome. I get an American, an American with a Texas accent. This one starts asking questions and I don't even understand the question, let alone answer in English. So this one sees me and I can't answer and so she starts screaming 'you are cheating' and at that point in Italian I told her, 'Maybe I am doing it, but I should understand what you mean by you are cheating' and this one turns purple and says, 'You are cheating means she's making fun of me and she is doing this.' And so you can imagine that is the interview, the first interview of your life and you say, 'Okay.' I say, 'Look, no, I didn't want to make fun of you. You said that skills can be learned, you would teach them, that what mattered was merit and determination, go review my written test and see if I have the skills.' She is a bit annoyed, looks at the written test and says just like this: 'Unfortunately, you did it very well.' as if to say, it bothers me, but I have to send you to the second level. She sends me, yes, she really wanted to fail me, but she didn't succeed. Okay, she sends me to the second level and I said now whatever they ask me I'll only tell the truth, nothing but the truth after all the slaps I've taken and this Marco, to put me at ease, says, 'Come on, I know the first interview didn't go very well, I'll ask you an easy question. How do you see yourself in 15 years?' And here I say, and here I tell the truth, in 15 years I see myself as a CEO. At that point he rolls his eyes and says, 'Well, actually they told me everything, even that they wanted my job, but that they wanted to become my boss, no?' And at that point I told him, 'But guys, you have to agree, you told me I had to be sincere, the truth is this.' He started laughing, he told me, 'You're one of us, you certainly don't lack determination.' Why do I always tell this story? It's true that I now, and here I come to the question, it's true that I now wouldn't answer like that anymore, because there were the 20 years, there was the enthusiasm you have at 20, maybe you lack a bit of humility, now at 50, you wouldn't answer like that, but I understood from then that assertiveness is not a bad word, but not even for us women. That is, if you wait for someone to open the chest of opportunities for you, it will never open for men or women and especially for us women. But we were raised with the idea that wanting to realize yourself professionally is a mortal sin because automatically if you want to be a career woman you must be a terrible mother. Automatically in Italy it is like this. And so, so that I didn't think of being a mother or anything else, but already then I told myself assertiveness, if then I balance it with a lot of commitment, with a lot of sacrifice, with a lot of hard work, it cannot be a bad word, it cannot be a bad word. And so, believe me, every time the opportunity presented itself, I raised my hand. Then sometimes they gave me that opportunity and many other times they didn't give it to me, but surely it was them who didn't choose me, not that I took a step back.

I felt very lucky as a girl and you say, but lucky for what? In the sense that I started working in 1997 and it was a different geological era. There was no flexible work, you certainly couldn't work from home, there were no iPhones, there wasn't even the Blackberry, does anyone remember it? So, you really had to work in the office and so I worked from 9:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night and woe to leave before 10 because we were the last to arrive and we could leave when the last boss had gone home. So I arrived home around 11:00 at night and studied until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and so, well, it was really intense to study and work. In fact, my friends when I told them, 'But lucky for what, you study, you work, you have a hard time' and I told them, 'No, I feel lucky first because I had the luck to be born in a family that loved me so much.' We were rich in love and again my father had this wisdom that said: 'Cristina, we are poor in everything else, but we are rich in love. Focus on this because it is always better to focus on what you have than on what you don't have.' So I felt surrounded by a family ready to support me. I felt then that I had enough grit, enough energy to try to fight and then I was infinitely grateful to life because I had managed to go first to Bocconi and then to Procter and Gamble and so I felt already then that I had to give back the famous give back. Well, I didn't call it GB because, well, I had still fought with English, they taught me later, but I really wanted to and the Red Cross represented this opportunity for me because, well, every Saturday night from 7:00 in the evening to 7:00 in the morning I was a volunteer on the ambulances, a thing I maintained even when I went to Rome and I must say there I learned a lot, especially there I learned the importance of the 'we', because leadership is not 'I, I, I'. Leadership is 'we'. Leadership is moving from what you can achieve to what the team, the team as a whole can achieve. Volunteering taught me the spirit of the musketeers, all for one, one for all. There I also for the first time took an infinite slap. I will always remember it, I also told it in the book, when she got sick. Yes, I was squeamish and well, when you are on the ambulances, once there is a road accident, once there is a drug addict, every now and then there are very, very hard scenes. I will always remember I was with two soldiers because the shift was done by civilians and soldiers together and so they already didn't look favorably on the fact that civilians were less prepared than them and it was true. Then I was also a woman, so I had everything against me. And so we go up and we arrive at the house of this person who had a tumor in the eye, a tumor in the eye that was oozing everything. And they ask me to do the dressing and I can't do it, I look at it, I try, then I feel a nausea stronger than me and I understand one that I did well not to do medicine, second that I wouldn't have handled it well. So what do I do? I look at the wife, I start talking to the wife so as not to show that I was feeling bad, I pass the gauze to one of my two colleagues and he does the dressing. Then I leave that house feeling really failed, because it was the first time that despite all the commitment, all the determination, all the self-discipline I could impose on myself, I hadn't made it. And so I remember that I walked from the barracks which is the Red Cross barracks in Milan, to my house which is on the other side of Milan. At 7:00 in the morning I must have walked an hour and a half under that beautiful Milan fog thinking 'They will never take me, I wanted it, I gave my all, but my all wasn't enough.' And I felt the defeat really burning. Then what did I learn? I learned that yes, that day those two soldiers rightly gave me a negative evaluation because I wasn't up to par, but they taught me something more important, that is, you fall, then you grit your teeth and get up and the next time you try harder and then you try even harder until together with them, thanks to them, you overcome your limits. I am grateful to that person I will never see again and to that team I will never see again, because there I learned that points of weakness are actually a point of strength. When you understand and admit with humility that that is a point of weakness and you have the courage to ask your team to give you a hand to improve, then a magic is created. Collective success becomes more important than individual success and you are no longer just 'I'. But you are a 'we' and the 'we' achieves results that any 'I', even the best 'I', cannot achieve. So from volunteering I learned this. I learned the importance of the team and the importance of fragility. Then I learned a thing that we were saying before and that is I learned that the real challenges are not those that have to do with the career. I believe that life, just like career, is a marathon, it's not a sprint, it's not about winning the 100 meters, it's about winning many 100 meters. The marathon is long and in the marathon there is the moment when you run, the result comes easily, many people applaud you and everything seems easy. Then the climb comes, the cramps come, the shortness of breath comes and then comes the moment when you really fall and scrape your knees. The strange case, when you fall, when you scrape your knees, if you look around there are many fewer people to applaud. There are a few left, good ones, but there are a few left. And it is there that you have to look inside yourself and you have to understand why it was so important for you to start running. And so if you understand why it was so important for you to start running, then you find the strength to get up and start running again. But there you have to understand that your run cannot become an obsession because you run perhaps for a professional challenge, but next to you there are people who run for much more important issues, health, illness, family, children. Those are the real marathons, not your wanting to achieve your professional goal. So there you understand that leadership is not arriving first at all costs. Leadership is taking care of the people you meet on those very long 42 kilometers that make up the life of all of us. Well, this is what I learned from volunteering and...

...wherever I was in the world. And then at 39 and a half, I had the great fortune of being sought out by L'Oréal, which offered me the position of CEO of L'Oréal Italia. And there I decided that volunteering for me had to become something different. It wasn't Cristina going on ambulances or doing other volunteer activities anymore, but rather the companies I had the honor of leading that would apply themselves sincerely, authentically, truly in giving back to vulnerable people, in giving back to communities. And so in that first experience as CEO, what did I do? I encountered the Academy of Art in the Heart, which is an academy in Rome for young people with disabilities.

I went and discovered a completely different world. I discovered their strength was different. I, who believed myself to be a very determined and resilient person, on that day I looked around and said, 'What am I talking about resilience? I, who am basically in good health — real resilience is that of these young people who every day fight against the limits imposed by their disability. They are the ones who are resilient, they are the ones who have courage. Courage isn't wanting one more star and fighting to get it. Real courage is this.' And so with the president of the Academy of Art in the Heart, we said, 'Alright, but let's do something different. Let's not do the usual sponsorship that Mama Procter before and Mama L'Oréal after could have done. Let's do something different. Let's send the newly hired managers, fresh out of university with a good dose of arrogance from the best universities — let's send them here for three days to the Academy of Art in the Heart to learn what real resilience is. Not to teach, but to learn — to learn from these disabled young people.' Believe me, it was an experience that was more than touching. We sent over 100 young people to the Academy of Art in the Heart, and all of them came back having understood two things. First, the importance of keeping your feet on the ground. Second, the importance of wounds. Because these disabled young people taught us the art of Kintsugi. I don't know if you know it — I didn't know it before. The art of Kintsugi is this Japanese art where when a precious vase falls and breaks, they don't glue it back together trying to hide the break. Instead, they attach it with gold or silver streaks that are evident, strong, because they want to show that there is a scar, there was suffering, but there was the courage to get back up. And for me, this was an incredibly powerful message — for me and for those 100 young people who learned, as I did, and as all of us do, the importance of keeping our feet on the ground. The fragility of each of us is part of our lives. Some more, some less, some in a more visible way and some in a less visible way, but we all have our fragilities. And so if you are a leader, you must take on the fragility of others and you must teach others above all that fragility can be a strength — it should not be hidden. We should not be ashamed of our battles, of our scars, because they are what make us the type of person — not just the type of manager, but the type of person — that we truly are.

Fornero. Well, here I could give two answers — one true and one politically correct. So let's give the true answer. A woman cannot show her fragility while she is on the career path. It's not the politically correct answer, but it's the truest one. I started publicly showing my teams, my collaborators, my points of fragility when I had become CEO, because I am deeply convinced — and I hope I'm wrong — but I am deeply convinced that I would not have become CEO if I had shown them earlier. Because making a career is difficult for everyone, men and women without difference — not everyone who enters a company becomes a CEO. It's difficult for men too, but let's be honest, for women it's much more difficult. For women, it's not enough to be among the best — you have to be THE best, because otherwise they don't look at you, they pass you on the right, on the left, above and below. And so in the growth path, showing our fragilities is not the best way. Then you can be lucky, you can have an enlightened boss, but since you can only control yourself and not whether your boss is enlightened or not, it's much more difficult. It's much more difficult. I have always said with great sincerity that first you have to win by the rules of the game as they are, and then when you reach the top, you can change the rules of the game for those who come after. Now I can change — and I'm grateful for it — the rules of the game for the companies where I am CEO. But would I have become CEO at 39 if I had made these speeches before? Maybe not.

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