Forget about Italian managers in France, the luxury hotshots, or automotive superstars (who’ve moved into luxury) like Luca de Meo. Andrea Falleni, 56, a name unknown to most, is number two at consulting giant Capgemini, a group headquartered in Paris with 350,000 employees worldwide. His official title is “CEO of Southern Europe Strategic Business Unit” and he sits on the board of this conglomerate founded in Grenoble in 1967.
He’s a kind of Martian in the world of big Parisian business among the former students of the grandes écoles; he’s from Bologna, and you can still clearly hear the accent. “Languages? English is fine, but I’m still working on my French,” says the manager, who looks less like someone off a Forbes cover and more like he stepped out of a Cesare Cremonini song. Born “into a normal family, dad an entrepreneur in the packaging sector, which is one of Emilia’s great districts. Even in France, you know, Macron is trying to apply the entirely Italian recipe of districts. Which is one of our strengths. You open a business, employees open others, there are suppliers…” But what kind of districts does the French president want to create? “In Toulouse with aerospace, where there are Thales and Leonardo. Or in the north he wants to make the steel center, with aluminum and steel.”
Falleni studies Economics in Bologna not because he’s driven by sacred fire, but “because I was actually always passionate about computer science and would have liked to enroll in computer science, but that had limited enrollment, and I didn’t feel like spending the summer after graduation studying again.” Again, one imagines escapades on Vespas through the Bologna hills or at the bar in Capraia, or Elba island, where he waits tables in summer to make some extra money.
But destiny pursues him. Here comes the permanent job at a bank, the eternal dream of all Italians, except he gets bored, and so at thirty-two he sets up a small startup (which wasn’t called that yet back then), a company that makes software for banks. “How to manage current accounts, transfers, balances, things like that.” The first clients arrive like Bper, Intesa Sanpaolo, Popolare di Milano, who still use his products today. But at the beginning, like a typical Silicon Valley story, it was all a bit adventurous. “We went to banks and pitched our products, which however didn’t really exist at first, they were very much in my head, they actually needed an investor to be realized, and when banks then took us on we could finally develop them.” Fake it until you make it, Bologna style.
The little company does well, reaches eighty employees, headquarters in Piacenza. At a certain point though the little company goes into crisis: “One of the senior partners dies in a motorcycle accident and his children didn’t really understand what we did and don’t want to continue, so here’s a classic Italian SME crisis. An investment fund buys us, then they merge us with another company, of which I become general manager, then this French colossus arrives, Capgemini, which was uncertain whether to abandon Italy or not.” But the French don’t abandon and buy the little company with him inside, who shortly after becomes general manager for Italy. “Headquartered in Rome, but I didn’t want to stay in Rome, so I stayed in Milan.” Don’t you like the capital? “Yes, I do – but back then, everything revolved around Milan. Today, it’s more Rome.”
You go from the little company to the mega-galactic colossus, aren’t you afraid? “Of course, but they convince me to stay.” He even gets promoted, in Paris, to the big corporation, “everyone’s a vice president and they all have an assistant, two things I wasn’t used to.” Did the French look down on you? “Yes but so did my Italian colleagues. I didn’t come from the big universities, I was the Bolognese guy with the funny accent. I start studying French and English, because before I mainly spoke Italian, and sometimes, with my clients, to be more effective, we spoke more Valtellina dialect or Paduan.” Then he learned English well enough to be able to confront Mario Draghi a few months ago, in the interview that the former Prime Minister gave on European competitiveness at an international event held in Paris.
Differences between Italians and French? “Maybe the flaw of Italian companies is that they can’t imagine themselves outside Italy, they only think within national borders. The French instead aren’t afraid to challenge themselves in international contexts, it’s more in their DNA, like Americans, English, Dutch. They don’t understand that to become a national champion you have to become global.”
How do you see the political situation in France? “I was a big fan of Macron’s reform drive but now the political scene is hard to read. The situation in France is much more complicated than we imagine.” And Trump’s America? “It penalizes uncertainty above all, if you’re a manufacturer it takes years to move production, and in uncertainty you don’t decide, so everywhere there’s a big slowdown.”
Time for the unavoidable question about artificial intelligence. “We’re inserting it into every product, but it will take a few years to see real changes. There will need to be a leap, something, to see AI acceleration. If we think about the Internet, it was already an important thing, but the real boom came with the iPhone in 2007, ten years after Internet Explorer. Someone will do something that will make it boom. We don’t know yet who or what it will be.”
Is there any manager or entrepreneur who inspires you around the world? “Musk, his character aside. And Satya Nadella: when he entered Microsoft it was like IBM, it was a completely different and old company, now they’re ‘new’.” And in Europe? “My friend De Meo first at Renault and now at Kering.”
You’re not getting a bit too Frenchified: Italian or French cuisine? “Italian without any doubt, I often cook for the other board members.” Sports? Paris St. Germain? “Virtus Bologna.” Cinema? Chabrol? Lelouch? “No way, Sergio Leone.”
