Dearest and most dear,
another stage in the great journey of our community has been completed and this three-year period - as time passes - has come to an end. The epilogue was extraordinary: Milan Bocconi's Sinergie-SIMA Management Conference 2022 (which I had to follow remotely, damn it!) Was a resounding success and sealed the conclusion of this council.
It was a very important three-year period, which also had to go through the pandemic. A period in which, with the guidance of a great President, the commitment of an extraordinary group, the support of the whole group, we have done great things: we have affirmed the relevance of our scientific society and our community, we have consolidated many activities and launched new relevant projects.
This is the moment where, rejoicing at where we have arrived, it is also nice to look back at the starting point and the path we have taken.
SIMA was born in 2013. In previous years, the world around us was changing at high speed and great challenges were forcefully presenting themselves before us: internationalization, evaluation, openness, institutional political dialogue. Our previous governance models had largely outlived their function. The grouping was largely stationary, disoriented, fragmented. There was a kind of emptiness. There was a need to start a new season.
Thus, we created our Scientific Society: open, representative, elective, animated by no other motivation than a spirit of service, an indispensable tool for facing the great challenges we had before us, a context in which to rebuild our sense of community, scientific and not only.
And we started, we built, we were builders, with commitment, passion, determination, a spirit of service, patience, a sense of communion and union. With an extraordinary group, which has been renewed several times and each time has confirmed its value and its values. Convinced of the goodness and inevitability of the project.
We created our Scientific Society, out of nothing. Statute, manifesto, identity, etc .; without having financial resources (think that the first social shares arrived in the middle of the second year ...), without a secretariat, without a website, without anything. From scratch. And we have achieved many things, I mention the main ones - more or less in chronological order - in a list that is certainly not exhaustive:
But we have not done only things: we have favored the consolidation of our community, the most precious asset.
Looking back, we must be proud of everything we have accomplished, of how our community has grown. We have shown that if you believe in an important idea, supported by strong values and carried out by extraordinary people, you can climb mountains. Even at the expense of forces that did not welcome this evolution.
Looking ahead, we have an incredible future that awaits us. It's just the beginning, we can only do better and better. The new group is a guarantee of the fact that - with commitment, determination, communion, vision, spirit of service - it will be possible to do great things, strengthening everything done and reaching new important goals.
Today I pass the hair of Past President to Sandro, who was a great President, he guided us with vision, balance, determination, kindness, sharing, expressing his extraordinary value as a person, professional, friend, President. I become past past very past President.
And in greeting, let me thank with my heart all those who made possible the extraordinary SIMA adventure and the great results achieved. And in particular those who have dedicated themselves to our Company in the last three years. I want to thank you and hug you one by one (we are so far away): The President Sandro, the Vice President Tonino, the General Secretary Arabella, the Treasurer Alberto - who never knew which Alberto was called to intervene in the Councils, the Directors / Auditors who remain (Andrea, Elita, Francesco, Laura, Angelo, Ludovica, Lara, Maria, Savino), the Directors who go (Alfonso, Federico, Franco, Guido, Stefano), the Editor in Chief of the magazine and Responsible for Synergies of the Conference Marta, the secretariat Adele, the delegate to the Festival Roberto, the delegate to the Impact Budget Angelantonio, the representatives of the Next Generation (Beatrice, Elena, Elona), the heads of the thematic groups, the head office representatives, all the friends and collaborators of Sinergie Italian Journal of Management.
The experience at SIMA was an extraordinary opportunity for personal enrichment, thanks to the meeting with all of you, the opportunity to get to know each other, work, engage, have fun together. And previously and with other friends and other friends who have preceded you since the beginning of the story.
And as past past very past President, allow me to conclude by leaving a message, a recommendation. Let us remember that the supreme value of the SIMA project is the community. And that the value of our community depends on our capacity for communion, to work for the common good, to overcome particular interests and personalities, to put ourselves at the service. SIMA is a precious asset, it is our home, let's safeguard it.
Again an affectionate and grateful greeting to the friends of the outgoing Council and a very big good luck to the new Council! I am sure that you will be able to make our home more solid and beautiful.
W SIMA, ad majora semper!
Alberto Pastore
Dear colleagues, I take the opportunity of this newsletter to greet you and to provide you with some considerations regarding my experience at SIMA in the three-year period 2019-2022. First of all, I like to point out that, thanks to my activity as a member of the Board of Directors, I met new colleagues and I got to know better people whose attendance was often limited to short meetings during conferences or on the occasion of insolvency proceedings. It was therefore above all an opportunity for personal and professional enrichment, which made me appreciate the human qualities and skills of my colleagues on the steering committee, starting with President Sandro Castaldo and past President Alberto Pastore. Moreover, thanks to the continuous discussions, I was able to better investigate the problems of our disciplinary grouping also in light of the different sensitivities, visions and cultural perspectives of colleagues, due to personal and geographical factors, linked to the university of origin. It was also an opportunity to propose some ideas and values that have guided me since the beginning of my career, underlining the importance for a professor of Economics and Business Management to try their hand at all the activities that qualify our profession: carry out teaching, research, third mission and service activities to the University institution to which they belong, paying attention to ethically correct conduct and the impact of our work on society, paying particular attention to students, to whom it is important not only to transmit technical and specialized notions, but tools to better face the complexity of acting and living in complex environments, favoring collaborative and not just competitive logics. Finally, working in SIMA allowed me to share with my colleagues the idea that the role and activities of our Association are fully exploited when they are able to foster cultural, value and vision cohesion among all the teachers belonging to the disciplinary group of Economics. and business management, going beyond the inevitable differences induced by disciplinary specializations and territorial locations. I believe that this cohesion is important to strengthen the identity and sense of belonging of the Italian economy and management community and to strengthen our positioning with public institutions, businesses and society. At the end of these brief notes, I would like to thank Sandro Castaldo for the trust placed in me, for the precious work and for the ways in which he exercised leadership in a time of health emergency and profound changes in university rules, in search of new insertion and evaluation of people, projected towards the imperative of opening up the scientific community to internationalization, enhancing the Italian cultural specificities. With your tenacious and farsighted guide you have been able to involve and support the group, guiding it to achieve important goals that have strongly strengthened the identity of SIMA, increasing the sense of belonging and community in economics and business management scholars, mitigating historical divisions between groups. Finally, I take this opportunity to wish good work to the members of the new board of directors to consolidate what has been achieved so far and to achieve new important goals at the service of our group and society.
Tonino Pencarelli
Dear colleagues, a few lines to greet and thank. Certainly these 6 years of SIMA management were an interesting experience, which allowed us to get to know each other better among colleagues and to find new opportunities for scientific collaboration: the confirmation that the time dedicated to making the "common thing" grow is never wasted, but it adds value to what each of us tries to do. But there is another thing that seems important to me to remember. Those of us with a few more years come from a different world: different methods of competition, different logics of belonging to the various schools, which often ran the risk of having a preponderant weight compared to the mechanisms of operation and, why not, of construction of the same academic careers. I believe that the greatest merit that must be recognized to those who have led our Scientific Society in recent years is that of having chosen - and I assure you that it has not always been easy - to "trust" each other, to try to build, in our small grouping, a "new world", different, unitary. The annual Sinergie Sima conference, the accredited magazine Scopus, are some of the steps along this path, which found an important sign in this year's Bocconi conference. I believe that all this is a heritage to be preserved and continuously increased, and I am sure that the new members of the board will not fail to do so. Thanks again to everyone for this wonderful experience.
Federico Testa
Dear colleagues
With some regret I close this long experience in the Sima board, just now that things were getting so interesting!
I shared the project of a new sector association from the very beginning, when the Sinergie container was difficult to adapt to changes and a new demand for aggregation came from young researchers. With foresight from Sinergie the Technical Consultation Table (2TC) was born, the first sprout of the new Sima.
From that experience, different sensitivities towards our sector association were born, because in addition to the enthusiasm of those who contributed to its birth, more than any other risk, the competition of numerous international organizations already established loomed over Sima.
The change, measured by the vqr, by the citation indexes and the lists of accredited journals, has long pushed, and still pushes, our colleagues to seek opportunities for publication and collaboration away from their offices and ... .. from traditional journals of sector.
So we worked with a bipolar logic: Sima to consolidate a network of national relations, international networks to feed an innovative scientific production for themselves and for young researchers. For a few years this approach worked, but now it is no longer needed.
I am convinced that in the next few years we will have the problem of selecting and not promoting, consolidating, establishing roots, but certainly no longer explaining to ourselves to what extent Sima constitutes a concrete opportunity for growth and promotion for all of us.
Good luck to the next
Francesco Calza
Having now reached the end of the 6 years spent in the SIMA Board of Directors, the right moment has come to leave space for others. They have been 6 years full of changes, of growth, of constant commitment in favor of our disciplinary grouping. We have seen reforms that have committed us to always and in any case try to be clear, to give precise and consistent information with a spirit of service and passion, especially towards the youngest.
In the 6 years I spent at SIMA, I mainly dealt with internationalization and Thematic Groups. They were two captivating, demanding challenges that have seen us grow considerably. We have expanded the opportunities for growth at an international level by entering into agreements with many important international institutions and, at the same time, with the Thematic Groups we have tried to unite scholars with common research interests around the same theme, in order to facilitate networking and various collaborations.
There are many people with whom I have worked in these 6 years and I cannot list them all. At SIMA, I made new friends that, I'm sure, will go far beyond the Academy. I thank everyone for this.
At the end of the course in SIMA, however, I would like at least to underline the great humanity, availability, common sense and passion that have always characterized the way everyone works, always at the service of a community that has become, day after day, a true and own family.
Stefano Bresciani
My experience, as a member of the SIMA Board of Directors, in the three-year period 2019-2022, has given me the opportunity to understand that the Italian Management Company is increasingly destined to recompose, or rather, to safeguard those bonds of the academic structure, those forms of coagulation and overall and lasting aggregation, which, in my opinion, the recent university reform has instead, in some ways, strongly compromised, fueling centrifugal forces and fragmentation within the academy. I believe that this is the greatest value, the main lesson, among many, that I have drawn from this stimulating experience, which I had the honor and pleasure of living.
The operating methods of SIMA, largely induced by the enlightened orientations of the two Presidents who have followed one another continuously over time, respond precisely to logics that go in this direction. They are characterized by constant discussion, for the search for the widest sharing, for the openness to proactivity, for the active participation by members, at all levels. Given the plurality of contributions, which have been proposed from time to time, I happened to appreciate the continuous search for sharing and the commonality of intent in the planning and implementation of the various SIMA initiatives. I understood that the values practiced in SIMA are the true glue that makes cohesion between members, mutual commitment, teamwork possible, at the basis of the excellent results achieved so far.
I am sure that the current members of the Board of Directors and the new elected members will be able to harmonize in the best possible way and continue to operate according to these methods, consolidating principles, beliefs and procedures that will increasingly make SIMA the academic body destined to express and safeguard identity. depth of SECS / P-08.
I therefore wish for the future increasingly challenging projects and ever better results!
Best wishes,
Alfonso Siano
A few days ago, at the Sinergie-SIMA conference 2022, we paid homage to Salvio Vicari in view of his retirement. It was himself, six years ago, who passed me the baton of the first of the several activities that I would later carry out in SIMA. It was Management Notes, our blog now hosted on the Mark Up portal, which I took in hand briefly with the aim of making it grow in terms of content.
But my adventure in SIMA will always remain linked to the school of methodology. A school desired, designed and managed with SIM that was born to achieve a specific goal: to provide PhD students and research collaborators with solid methodological foundations.
If I look at the amount of work carried out to launch the first initiative in Naples and to organize and manage subsequent editions, I must admit that it was a lot. A workload that does not weigh, however, because the satisfaction obtained has always compensated for the effort. Satisfaction that we have seen in the eyes and in the words of the students to whom my first and warm thanks go: I hope you will obtain research contracts, national qualifications and PA posts as if it were raining!
A deep thanks goes to those who have worked with me at the school over the years, Matteo De Angelis and Geri Iasevoli and, in the shadows but with a fundamental role, Adele Ferragamo and Barbara Amici. A third thanks to the Presidents of SIMA who with foresight first wanted this school (Alberto Pastore) and then insisted on bringing it online during the pandemic (Sandro Castaldo).
Among the various things that are managed in SIMA (for the incoming executive: get ready! There are so many!) I then worked together with many colleagues who I do not appoint (but whom I thank) to the new series of Business cases Management and Marketing Cases with Pearson. After the start-up phase, there is still a lot of work to be done. But the direction taken is the right one.
Thanks to all colleagues for this beautiful adventure. I hope to be able to lend a hand again in the near future. Because once you join the SIMA board, you never really leave it.
Guido Bortoluzzi