Success Is Organization and a Good Team
Giving birth to her first child a few days after the launch of a new editorial product was perhaps not a hoped-for coincidence, but there is no best moment because all moments are wrong: there is always an obstacle lurking. And so Alice Mentana became a mother and, in parallel, managed the launch of Eco, a magazine on economic issues directed by Tito Boeri, Head of the Department of Economics at Bocconi University. A challenge at the limit of the humanly possible? In part, perhaps, but, says the CEO of Open Group, the publishing house of the online newspaper Open, the geopolitics magazine Domino, and now Eco: “Success also depends on the working method each of us has. If you have an orderly, clear, concentrated organization behind you, there are greater chances you can make it. It is essential to know how to build a good work team at the root of this organization, in which all its members contribute with their specific skills. Nobody needs to be a know-it-all; it’s better if there is a balance of various forms of knowledge and abilities. There are people who can be better in one area, and others in another. I think I have achieved my results also thanks to my colleagues.”
In terms of magazine launches, Ms Mentana has brought success to fruition already. Starting from the publication of Domino “while I was still working in television and, in particular, I was preparing a marketing operation with a sponsor to support a program. They called me to develop the editorial project and I contributed with my idea of a pop journal on geopolitics which was increasingly becoming a topic of daily conversations for many Italians in 2022. Following that approach, I set up the graphic layout, the presentation of the contents on the page so that the topics were not off-putting or exclusively for insiders of foreign policy. Here, when I talk about a necessary and good organization of the work, I mean exactly knowing how to address all these aspects. There were also technical issues, such as the distribution of copies, which I learned in the field. There were specific decisions to be made on some issues on which I was helped by my work team,” reiterates Mentana, confirming the importance of a valid group of colleagues to support new enterprises.
According to the Bocconi alumna with a Master of Science in Marketing Management, the propensity for working on teams and knowing how to grasp the abilities of each person arose precisely during her university assignments. And Alice Mentana soon started working full-time in TV production, while completing her academic studies. “The pace was always tight and there were no weekends,” she emphasizes, “but they were also very structuring periods of life. While I was following the production of an important format and the promotion of a Disney film, I also took my last session of finals. In those moments you are under stress and you learn to be the one who directs and lines up the commitments to bring home the results. It is a sort of inner awareness that makes you evolve from student to full-fledged worker,” continues Mentana. She ended up working in TV production with the company Fremantle for more than seven years, after a stint in business consulting before becoming CEO of the Open group in 2023.
Not all commitments, however, can be organized as one would like. “Of course. And work experience slowly teaches you to look for the empathy key to finding solutions even with the most distant interlocutors,” concludes the Bocconi alumna. “You learn when to speak, what to say and when it is better to remain silent. Then the results start to arrive.” And they are satisfying, if, say, you happen to return to the hallways of your university no longer as a student but as the manager of a publishing group, ready to present your new economics magazine Eco with a baby child in your arms.
