New York transforms the encounter between people, ideas and ambitions into a continuous source of energy. From 6 to 8 November, a part of this energy has had an Italian leading theme: the 26th conference of NOVA-MBA, the association that brings together over 3,000 professionals of Italian origin with an MBA obtained in the main American and European business schools. Born twenty-five years ago on the initiative of students of the universities of the Ivy League, with the support of personalities such as Nobel Franco Modigliani, NOVA chose for the edition 2026 a theme, «From Italian Roots to Global Scale: Executing Innovation», which poses a concrete question: how to transform skills and insights into initiatives capable of growing and competing on a global scale.
The Consul General of Italy in New York, Giuseppe Pastorelli, brought the greeting of the institutions. The central day, Saturday, November 7, brought together representatives of finance, consultancy, industry and innovation: among the realities represented were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, KKR, Lazard, Bain & Company, BCG X, Italgas, Angelini Industries, MCH Group, P101, Lingotto and FACEIT Group. From the capitals needed to grow enterprises to technological transformations, interventions offered different views on the challenges of leadership and internationalisation. Some of the meetings, including the panel dedicated to finance and private equity, with Paolo Battaglia (Lazard), Marco Prono (JPMorgan), Monica Mandelli (KKR) and Ivana Semeraro (iCON Infrastructure), and the meeting with Pierluigi Serlenga of Bain & Company, were moderated by Margherita Girardi, MBA student in Stanford and part of the organizing team.
At the gala dinner on Saturday evening, at Casa Cipriani, the word passed to the new generations. Matilde Iasi, master’s student at NYU Tandon and part of the organizing group, recalled the ten months of work next to a team that defined extraordinary and the sense with which NOVA was born: building a community of Italians abroad that help to grow. This year, he said, that goal was tested. From that test he learned that “when a plan jumps, you become creative” and, above all, how much it is worth giving a chance to young people: a group of students asked many of the present time, name and support, no one was obliged to accept and many said yes. Many of the guests, he added, were once the young people who asked, and today’s students will be those who will one day say yes. His toast was “at NOVA and the next 25 years”.
Andrea de’ Castiglioni, 22 years old, head of the organization of the conference and founder of Locu AI, a startup in the field of live events, focused time. He asked the room how many times, in that week, we had said “devo” and how many “I would like”, observing that the verb already decides the ranking: what is due almost always wins on what you want. The expiry of an examination, the stage of a project, the notification of a meeting have the precedence; the idea postponed for years, the work that would be done, the people who would want to see more do not send notifications. He then went to artificial intelligence: every month, he said, he transforms commodity skills that until yesterday were rare, such as writing code, drafting an analysis, building a model. What remains precious is the ability to ask the right question, to move between markets, to understand when a response seems correct but is wrong, and that is exactly what, according to him, the path of the present trained them.
In a market where the asticella of rarity continues to rise, it has argued, being good will not suffice: you will have to be extraordinary, and no one becomes extraordinary in something that endures only. For this reason, choosing well counts more than ever, that it is a bank, a startup, a research laboratory or a project that no one yet understands: “it must be a choice and not an obedience”. To those who can find naive that it is a twenty-year-old to talk about optimism, in a world of bad news, he replied that optimism “is not not to see problems”, but to refuse to believe that they have the last word. He recalled the «whatever it takes» by Mario Draghi in 2012 and the idea, expressed by Draghi in front of a class of students, that the pessimist does not serve anyone: if time is the only thing that is not recovered, spending it in pessimism is the worst of investments.
In an increasingly digital world, he noted, people increasingly choose to find themselves in person, like that night. Yet the technology built around these moments is designed for those who buy the ticket and almost never for those who organize them, which today is drawn between tickets, sponsors, staff, suppliers and artists with a dozen tools that do not communicate with each other. It is the problem on which Locu AI works, which develops an operating system for live events together with Marco De Vellis, the author of the essay Time Doesn’t Scale from which de’ Castiglioni had left. He closed with three things to take home: to choose his own path instead of obeying him, to be optimistic by choice and not by naivety, and sometimes to turn a “devo” into a “I would like”. “Intelligence can be bought in tokens. Knowledge is copied, the capital accumulates. No time. »
To close the interventions was Tommaso Stefani, co-founder and president of NOVA-MBA and president of NOVA Foundation, who remembered how, twenty-five years after the foundation, every year a kind of miracle is repeated: “you are all of us together, with our sense of belonging to a community of people who want to have an impact and take care of others”. He thanked former presidents, including Francesco Tronci, the President-in-Office, Ubaldo Messiah, and Alessandro Santo, called “an untiring engine” of the association. The young people left four councils. Working hard, because inspiration counts perhaps for 5% and the rest is perspiration, and not just looking at the salary. Knowing how to manage crises, remembering the sentence of Charlie Chaplin that life is a tragedy seen close and a comedy seen from afar. Do not be afraid to take the initiative, because the only way to predict the future is to create it. And cultivate integrity, because without it there is also forgiveness of intelligence and energy: “do not let your talent bring you to a place where your values cannot follow you”. He concluded by relaunching the invitation, made by one of the speakers of the day, to study and work abroad but to return, at some point, in Italy, because Italy needs its talents.
From the evening of Casa Cipriani came the same message, said by different people: a community works when those who have already built make available experience and time, and those who start bringing ideas and initiative. It is this exchange, more than the individual interventions, to give concreteness to the theme of the conference: starting from its Italian roots to build opportunities and international projects, with the look already addressed to the next twenty-five years.
L’articolo NOVA-MBA in New York, innovation, leadership and a passage of witness among generations proviene da IlNewyorkese.
