Yes, the cold winds of recession are still blowing; but here in Milan things are hotting up for smart, creative firms...

I’ve just realised it’s been almost a year since I posted in this blog. That’s mainly because my focus has been elsewhere recently – in particular on Riverstone Language & Communications, the Social Business Forum, Interpret the Future and a number of other cool projects I have been working on. Right – so it’s time to bring you up to speed with what’s been happening here in Milan.

Well, the summer is over and here in this city that means that everything is really getting going again. Despite concerns about the economic situation (not to mention the political one) the business capital of Italy is revving up – and although confidence is not what it once was, these days there is a surge of interest and business activity being generated by Milan’s vibrant startup scene. It’s true that Italy’s traditional manufacturing sectors are facing huge challenges in the form of cheaper competition from abroad, depressed global markets for consumer goods and the cumbersome bureaucracy that tends to characterise the Italian business context; but on the plus side, Italy has a vast reservoir of talent, inventiveness and intelligence that it can put to good use. It is this country’s wealth of human capital that drives it – in conjunction, of course, with its legacy of beautiful landscapes and great food.

Milan is a post-industrial city
 that has reinvented itself as
a powerhouse of creative energy
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the last few years Milan has seen something of a renaissance in the form of new kinds of knowledge-based businesses as well as more dynamic – if smaller – companies that are tapping into the country’s wells of brainpower and creativity. They are also attracting more international talent – and, indeed, one of the key strengths of this city is its relative diversity compared to other cities in Italy. I have been lucky enough to work with several of these firms (see below for some examples).

I am proud to live in Milan and to have met a large number of highly-motivated and creative people from many different sectors: I have taught and worked as a communications consultant alongside finance executives, marketers, designers, lawyers, doctors, academics, technology specialists and professionals from many disciplines - as well as entrepreneurs in the city’s growing startup scene.

I have also been able to develop contacts and find new business opportunities via social networking, which has also meant getting to grips with an ever-changing array of new social media tools and platforms (as well good old-fashioned face-to-face conversation!). During this time, the Milan Business English Network, which I founded three years ago, has been a great way of meeting people and getting in touch with companies that are doing fascinating and ground-breaking projects.

Riverstone Language and Communications is an innovative and highly flexible training and development and organisation, which I established with Helen Fish, an entrepreneur from the UK who is now working on her own exciting project. Riverstone also provides bespoke language services and informal networking events that bring people together who are interested in English and business communication. The Riverstone Network is a growing resource that is helping its members – mainly freelancers – to develop their careers.

Currently, I am involved with a number of companies as a communications consultant. I’d just like to highlight two of these here, both of which are typical of the kind of small, highly able and passionate businesses that fuel this city's success:

Firstly, there is OpenKnowledge, which I believe is an example of all that’s best about Milan (including the company's international outlook - it has offices in London, Shanghai and Sydney). It’s basically a small but growing corps of highly focused and experienced consultants as well as recent graduates from top universities. The company's mission is to help mainly large corporations adopt the social business paradigm. OpenKnowledge has been a pioneer in bringing the social business message to the corporate world and for the last six years it has organised the hugely successful Social Business Forum – Europe’s leading event in this field, which attracts high-profile keynote speakers such as IBM Vice President Sandy Carter and has welcomed over three and a half thousand visitors in its short history (so far!). This year Riverstone became a Marketing Service Partner of the SBF and was responsible for managing a team of brilliant, young interpreters as part of the Interpret the Future project.

Another company I collaborate with on a regular basis is the award-winning Reverse Innovation. They are a young, dynamic design agency which provides amazingly creative designs for structural packaging and communications for major corporate clients as well as some smaller firms. I work closely with Reverse and their highly-effective press manager to make sure everything they say to the world in English is crystal clear and hits just the right note.

So, what's on the horizon this autumn, then? In addition to our sparkling aperitivos, the Milan Business English Network will be presenting a series of informal business discussions and networking sessions. These will be by invitation-only and will address some key Milan themes: social media (and social business); technology and innovation; fashion and design; marketing and communications; as well as medical / pharmaceutical and legal topics.

If you aren’t already a member of the Milan Business English Network, please join our group and find out about all the activities we are organising and how you can develop your professional network – as well as improve your communication skills in English.

I would also like to invite everyone to read NetworkMilan.com – the online news magazine of the MBEN. (Check out our special feature on "People and Wine" from earlier this year.)

If you need English for your work or travel – or you’re just interested in learning the world’s “lingua franca” – please get in touch with me. (See the contacts section of the Riverstone website for details.) You can also find me on LinkedIn – or just google the words “Milan”, “business” and “English” and you’ll find most of my groups.

I wish everyone a great autumn (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) – and if you’re in Milan, please drop into one of our events or give me a shout. I’m nearly always somewhere in the centre – usually with my laptop and an “Americano” coffee.

Between now and Christmas it will get much colder - winters in northern Italy can be bitter - but I will be kept warm by the energy coming off this most vibrant, resourceful and stylish of all European cities.

Viva Milano!

Robert Dennis 

CEO and Head of Innovation, Riverstone Language and Communications

Milan brains at work: Designers and problem solvers at UX Bootcamp Milano,
an event realised by Sketchin in collaboration with Frontiers of Interaction 2013,
Italy's leading international technology and innovation conference at Talent Garden Milano.
(I wasn't involved in this event. I just think this picture sums up what makes Milan great!)
Photo: Luca Mascaro

What's new? - Innovation, of course: An update from Milan by Robert Dennis...

A thermal head being used to create new 

CPUs and chipsets. (Photo: Wikimedia)

OK, time for another update. I have been doing a lot more communications-related work of late (recently) as well as teaching. And as I discussed in my last update, it’s always a challenge keeping up with clients and students who work in highly-specialised fields.

I have been teaching at a company that specialises in designing trains – more specifically, the electrical and pneumatic plant on the underside of the carriage. They work to incredibly tight specifications using 3D graphics programs. As with most other industries there are hundreds of acronyms to get used to (e.g. TCMS (Train Control and Monitoring System and HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning), as well as a raft (a lot) of engineering and technical terms, such as “bogie”, the wheeled wagon or trolley the carriage sits on. (Confusingly this is known as a “truck” in the US.) But, of course, they also need the day-to-day stuff: meetings, presentations and phone calls, etc.

Lessons are continuing at the biopharma company I teach at. I am always amazed by the deluge (flood, inondazione) of new research that is constantly being undertaken worldwide and the therapies that are being developed. And even for the experts working in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, staying up to date is a constant but fascinating battle.

On the communications side, I was in Cambridge in April, where I visited Bletchley Park, Britain’s wartime top-secret codebreaking facility, where the world’s first programmable computer (Colossus) was built to crack the codes of the German High Command. I watched a video being specially filmed for the social media project I am involved in with OpenKnowledge srl. Again, it was fascinating chatting with scientists working at the cutting edge of technological research (in this case, advanced encryption techniques that exploit the spin effects of electrons).

I have also been spending time with a design firm that specialises in finding solutions relating to structural packaging (e.g. plastic containers for household detergents). This kind of industrial design marries engineering with aesthetics and it’s great to see how an idea goes from a pencil sketch to a rendered 2D image to a 3D prototype literally printed out using stereolithography. I'm really looking forward to developing some great communications projects with these guys!

If I had to pick one theme that unites the various industries I have been teaching people from and working with recently, it would be: innovation. Finding answers to challenging questions in the fields of pharmaceuticals, computer technology or industrial design requires an astonishing amount of insight, trial and error and perseverance. One aspect of what might be termed the “innovation industries” is the amount of research and effort that just gets discarded. The number of drafts that are scrapped or versions that are superseded can at times seem soul-destroying – but, of course, it’s all absolutely necessary as the goal is to find 100% workable solutions. (Interestingly, in the case of the biopharma industry, advances in genetics and computing are allowing compounds that have been thrown on the scrap-heap to be reinvestigated and possibly salvaged as new treatments. This is especially important where huge sums of money have been invested in compounds whose patents have expired: they can be given a new – commercial – lease of life.)

While older manufacturing industries decline in the West – and as Asian economies increasingly take over the “heavy lifting” – the need for ever-greater innovation can only increase. Of course this requires massive amounts of investment, not only from the industries themselves, but also from society as a whole in order to create highly-educated and creative workers able to come up with (think of / imagine) the next wave of solutions and technologies that will add value and drive the economy. Since I live here in Italy I can appreciate the importance placed on education (particularly higher education) in this country. Although at times it can seem that Italians tend to have a much more theoretical approach when compared with their more pragmatic Anglo-Saxon counterparts, you can really appreciate the value of the rounded (and often simply longer) education they receive – especially when it comes to applying creative brain-power to a problem.

I am really looking forward to extending and deepening my contacts with the individuals and businesses I am working with here in Milan. The next few months will also be an exciting time for everyone involved with the Milan Business English Network – we are planning a series of events and initiatives for the autumn. 

(Don't forget to read the latest news in NetworkMilan.com, our online magazine.)

Regards,

Robert

Words in the media: Crunch

If you’ve been reading the British press over the last few years, and in particular the coverage of the global financial crisis, there is one phrase that you will have found keeps cropping up: the credit crunch.

The term “credit crunch” relates to the lack of available credit, particularly the reluctance of banks to lend to each other (a practice known as interbank lending). Credit crunch is a suitably dramatic-sounding phrase that works well on TV and in newspaper stories, especially in headlines (where it can be simplified to just crunch when space is limited).

The word crunch lierally means to crush food between the teeth as when you bite into an apple. It can also suggest a sudden, powerful movement, such as the violent, metallic grinding sound produced when a car driver tries to change gear suddenly (known as crunching the gears). There is, I suppose, a cognitive similarity between this and the sudden shift in normal banking practice that caused an important mechanism in the economy to instantly seize up.

A large number of financial English phrases depict money and capital as a liquid (liquidity, currency, cash-flow, cash injection, etc). The image, then, of this liquid suddenly not flowing (as, for example, when we talk about funding drying up, or turning off the tap) or becoming solid (as in freezing someone’s assets) suggests that the financial engine of a business has stalled; there is an interruption to the flow of capital that it needs to keep running. Likewise, the credit crunch is both a metaphor for the sudden malfunction of the banking and finance sectors due to the absence of liquidity; and, of course, it’s also a description of the impact this has had on the wider economy as companies, in particular retailers and manufacturers – and consumers – are suddenly unable to operate because the machinery of financial institutions and markets have ground to a halt.

There are a number of ideas associated with “crunch”. The most common of these is that of eating something crunchy, such as an apple or a slice of toast. In order to crunch something it has to be hard to begin with but is then physically broken down by the action of one’s molars crushing it. Compare this to chewing, which is similar, but which involves a slightly different process. When you chew something, such as chewing gum or nougat you grind it between your back teeth, but instead of destroying or transforming its structure you are simply softening it while it retains its essential integrity. For example, if you chew a piece of meat it’s still a piece of meat when you swallow it. A bolus (the “ball” of food you make with your mouth) of apple or toast on the other hand has lost all its original texture (otherwise you would choke as it went down).

Crunch also suggests the act of biting into something (as in the expression to crunch into an apple), while chew implies that you have already either bitten off a piece or cut up something which is now entirely inside your mouth. (Think of the English expression to bite off more than you can chew.) If you were eating something which is chewy but too large to put in your much all at once (such as a Curlywurly, a popular sweet (confectionery) in Britain circa 1975, which consisted of long plaited strips of toffee dipped in chocolate), you would still have to bite off part of the Curlywurly before you could chew it.)

On the subject of confectionery nostalgia, the Double Decker (does it still exist?) consisted of a crunchy chocolate biscuit layer with a chewy soft nougat layer on top. The whole thing was coated in milk chocolate and the TV advertising that accompanied it (inevitably accounting for more than half of its appeal) featured legendary bearded political satirist and whimsical humorist Willy Rushden insisting that the Double Decker was alternately chewy and crunchy. (I suppose you really have to be British to appreciate this; it’s similar to listening to Italians discussing exactly which sugo (sauce) you need to have with farfalle (bow-tie pasta) in order to get exactly the right taste-texture sensation – the narcissism of small difference writ large?)

Crunchie, a honeycomb bar covered in chocolate, was (and indeed still is) crunchy. It’s classic advertising slogan “Get that Friday feeling” neatly combined the exploited worker’s alienation from his / her labour (you’re only happy when the weekend is nearly here) with the consumer’s ever-present desire for (and belief in) instant gratification (Why wait till Friday to feel happy? Have a chocolate bar now and it’ll cheer you up, even though it’s Monday morning.)

The expression number cruncher, which means someone who works with figures, usually statistics, is a slightly derogatory way of describing a person who only focuses on calculations and quantities, perhaps at the expense of imagination or creativity. (A similar prejudice is demonstrated by calling an accountant or book-keeper a bean counter.)

Crunch can also mean “important” or “critical” as in the phrases crunch time / moment or a crunch vote in Parliament or the US House / Senate (a decisive vote). Perhaps here, the underlying idea is that something is irrevocable and the players are under enormous pressure. I have the image of rocks being smashed together under an intolerable force, violently producing a dramatic result. I seem to remember something from school geography about metamorphic rock (marble?) being created this way (as opposed to igneous or sedimentary rock).

It’s also reminiscent of the car crunchers (or crushers) that were obligatory in every US police or detective show of the 1970s. In a scrapyard (junkyard, US) an outsize Ford or Thunderbird is grabbed by a huge magnet at the end of a chain hanging down from a swing arm. The car dangles in the air, swaying like a condemned criminal dispatched on a gibbet. Finally the arm swings round and the electro-magnet is suddenly cut. The car falls into the demonic jaws of a crusher, where it is pounded and buckled into a compact metallic cube, which the machine spits out onto a conveyor belt. A multi-layered symbol, the car crusher stands variously for:

• an immediate threat (quite often the driver would still be in the car, at the mercy of the mob boss waiting to give the signal – a raised cigar – to the crane operator)
• the brutality and callousness of the disposable consumer culture, chewing up and spitting out not only used cars, but also surplus Motown labour and dwindling natural resources
• a stand-in for the destroyer god in polytheistic religions (such as the Hindu divinity Kali). The feeding arm and the hydraulic jaws suggest a powerful (and hungry) being that must be propitiated, like the Minotaur. This seems to play on our deep-seated fear of becoming someone else’s lunch (and the unintentionally terrifying promise of overbearing Jewish grandparents that “Oy, I could eat you!” which their diminutive descendant may not realise is actually metaphorical)

The car crusher is invariably stopped at the very last moment by the hero (literally) putting a spanner in the works. (A device used in countless Hollywood films, including perhaps most memorably the Coen Brother’s Art Deco critique of American capitalism, The Hudsucker Proxy.) The gears crunch, the grinding jaws are suspended in a quivering, twitching vibrato that lasts just long enough for the potential victim to escape, followed immediately by the resumption of the screeching and growling of metal against metal (although with a slightly different twist in The Hudsucker Proxy – watch the DVD). Just so with the economic recovery, the anticipated resumption of business as normal – the newly-lubricated wheels of industry are starting to turn again. Capitalism may be a bad thing but the effects of a financial system coming to a halting, crunching end (with little sign of a revolution to follow) seem a lot worse. (Perhaps a case of the devil you know…).

On a final alimentary (food) note, the word crunch in Anglo-Saxon FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) marketing seems reserved for products made from nuts (including crunchy peanut butter) or for (sweet) biscuits. It is not normally applied to savoury things, such as crisps (patatine), which, however, in Italian are considered “croccante” (crunchy). Crisp in English suggests a certain brittleness of texture, while crunchy implies that something would bear at least several bites – i.e. it would have a certain durability or resistance (like a nut) not present in something as insubstantial as a crisp.