It was 10 o’clock in the morning and the company president was running late, as was his custom. The 12 members of the company’s management committee were sitting around the huge, lacquered table in the boardroom, some talking to each other, some checking their cell phones, some joking around, in an informal atmosphere. But there were three people who were very focused, and a little nervous about the meeting that was about to take place, because there had been a series of confrontations between them, at first indirectly, and then clearly in the open. This meeting was the one that could clarify what kind of organisation the company would have in its international expansion. On the one hand, the young 32-year-old export manager, Xavier, who had joined the company three and a half years earlier. Xavier had an M.B.A., spoke several languages, came from the world of the Big Four, and had an interesting career abroad, which he had exchanged for an offer in a family business with a strong presence in Italy, but none abroad. In that short time, he had managed to get the company, which had never exported before, to be present in several countries, with reliable big customers in more than 30 countries, mainly through distribution agreements, and was in advanced negotiations to buy a well-established distribution company in one of the large European countries. But what he was most proud of was having set up an industrial subsidiary, with a “green field investment” in Morocco, from incorporating the company, to locating the warehouse, equipping it, getting the permits and licences, moving the machinery from Italy, hiring the staff, and starting up the commercial activity. The last year and a half had been a very tough start-up period in a country as complicated as Morocco, with a very different culture and ways of working that were far apart from European standards.
