"Management" goes pop

When the Board of SIMA proposed me to manage the organization of the Festival, the key message had been, "We want to popularize the culture of management by making it accessible to everyone!"
Strange input, I thought, especially from academia.
But this challenge attracted me from the first moment.

Valuing the transversality of managerial talents, sharing ideas and passions but also skills and knowledge by connecting different worlds of people, businesses, territories and communities, surprising them through an innovative format of in-depth analysis and entertainment.
This is our philosophy and the spirit that pervades the work team every day, it is the attitude with which together we face all the phases of the project that will lead us to the realization of the first edition of the Festival, on February 3 and 4, 2023: from the fine-tuning of the format to the choice of themes and people who manage to demonstrate the importance of managerial skills in every field of activity, inspiring the audience with stories, experiences and testimonials of success.

When I then presented the project to SIMA members during the Annual Conference at Bocconi last July, I immediately grasped how the faculty audience also wanted to open up to the outside world.
And I understood this from the choice of the logo: among the various proposals I had shown, the majority went for the "Connect" concept, a graphic that is the epitome of sectoral transversality and heterogeneity of professions and people, a visual concept where management unites everyone.

Also that day, as I was leaving the stage, my old Professor of Industrial Technology (because I was told that "a few years ago" Enterprise Management was called that) came up to me and said, "I wish you well but it will not be easy for you to overcome the dichotomy between mission and context."
Yeah, because ours will not be a specialized conference, nor an academic congress, but a festival open to all. And the hospitality of Luigi Bocconi University of Milan will enhance the contributions of the SIMA community that will come from all the other SIMA offices. It will be an event spread throughout the Italian territory with a "home-like" atmosphere, as played on cheerful colors and familiar-looking materials, all recycled and recyclable. And the location lends itself to experiencing an immersive and inclusive environment; it will be the symbolic embrace with which we will welcome all participants, from very young students to managers, entrepreneurs and senior and authoritative figures.

In short, for every action we are taking and every decision we make, together with the entire management team we keep the bar straight and steady toward what is our true mission: how to direct thinking to generate solutions.

Raffaella Poggio
Project Manager Festival Del Management