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The EMBA made Federico look beyond. All the way to Congo

, by Andrea Celauro
The story of Federico, who after the SDA Bocconi master's degree has rethought his life

Sometimes an Executive MBA can provide not only new skills, but also the courage to definitively embrace an idea that has been around for a while. It happened to Federico Schivo, 47 years old and with twenty years of experience in supply chain and operations in the private sector in various companies and in consulting.

Thanks in good part to the SDA Bocconi EMBA program, he decided to embark on a new adventure very different from his previous ones: bringing his supply chain management skills to the humanitarian sector. Today, in fact, Federico's employer is Médecins Sans Frontières. "I have always had a great interest in the Third Sector," says the alumnus. "It was therefore not a sudden choice, because before jumping into this sector, which is a very varied universe, it is necessary to clarify what type of work you intend to do and what skills are required to do it."

Still fully immersed in his previous corporate life, Schivo came to EMBA at SDA Bocconi with "the need to acquire new and more multidisciplinary skills. I felt I wanted to expand my training." However, the desire for a new direction was already brewing. "That was also more generally a moment of rethinking my career and where I wanted to go. I felt I wanted new means to open new doors and for me the EMBA was a moment of awareness: it gave me greater awareness. The program is a challenge to get out of one's comfort zone and it also pushed me to look beyond, to a broader horizon."

That horizon, in Federico's case, has become the Democratic Republic of Congo, where today Schivo works in specific supply chain management projects, such as the one that saw him in North-Kivu to manage the flows of a regional hospital or the one in Kinshasa for the Urgency Pool of Congo, a rapid response project that intervenes to mitigate the health and humanitarian emergencies in the country.

"The EMBA sharpened a feeling I was harboring, gave me a vision and new tools to carry it forward." Furthermore, "This type of master is an exercise in resilience, one of the characteristics that are so important in my work, but it is also an exercise in adaptability, because it challenges you to work with people from very different backgrounds. And this is also a feature of my work today, with multidisciplinary teams from different backgrounds that change from project to project."

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