Experiencing never ends. The trip to South Africa ends up and I’m at the Frankfurth airport with enough layover time to summarize my thoughts.
First: South Africa is a great country with kind, friendly and smart people. They have unbelievable potentials and are growing a lot. They are aware of their problems and have a pragmatic approach in solving them and a sane proudness of the ones they already solved.
Second: doing Busines is not probably easier than in Italy but fore sure more straightforward. More I travel more I convince that we could be a great country if we didn’t travel with the handbrake. It’s not only a matter of rules, laws and burocracy. It’s even a matter of our entrepreneurial approach. We are smart, creative, hard workers… But we do have two main issues. We try to overcome our lack of job organization and quality with the quantity of worked hours. We are culturally not able to team up fast. Each of us is a “primadonna” convinced to do things better, which would be great is we would be able to keep all this enthusiasm and self initiative aligned with the company strategy and targets.
Third: getting out of the country was an experience more than getting in. I never saw at the airport a specific lane to check in firearms and weapons at the security check and I never had a so light security check. They were interested only in laptops and iPads. No interest in liquids, belts, watches and other metallic objects that I was wearing. Of course the metal detector threshold was high enough not to stop everyone, but I really think that I could have brought in a knife without to much problems. On the other side the passport control at the exit was much more accurate and time consuming than at the entrance and I cannot understand the reason.
At the end a very nice experience in a part of the world where I never had been, but where I need to go back soon.
Download the post
Subcribe to my newsletter to download the post as printable PDF