“Ok, I’ll give you the answers you probably wanted to hear when you came here. Let’s talk about what happiness is …”.
Nerio Alessandri he is at the head of the table, I am on his right, on the left the faithful Enrico Manaresi bounces on a ball like the ones we are sitting on. There are no chairs here, just large black balls that train the postural muscles. The secretary served us a light lunch on a plate covered with a kind of light wood nest (“If she wasn’t shy, you should interview her, she would tell you more interesting things than I’ll tell you”). We are in Alessandri’s office, in Technogym Village of Cesena, inaugurated on 29 September 2012 with the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano and the former American President Bill Clinton who that day, after talking with their daughter Erica about their respective dogs (labradors of course), left a autograph, on the wall, with marker: “Thank you Nerio, thank you for what you did”. Ten years later, he is still there.
The Village is a huge park, where the building designed by Antonio Citterio stands out like an ark, wood and endless windows through which the Romagna sunlight passes triumphantly, perhaps because the first “thing” he built, Nerio , at the age of six, it was a little house with Lego bricks without windows.
His story is formidable, if we were in America they would have made a film about it: the son of a sharecropping farmer and a factory worker who canned fruit, “one could not read, the other could not write”, but tenacious people and honest; when Nerio’s little brother arrives, his father decides to build a small house and leave the one where they lived with about twenty relatives; he raises it personally, in Gambetta, as was done in the 1960s, brick by brick, and becomes a laborer; little Nerio works immediately, in the afternoon he helps his mother; even when they enroll him in the Industrial Technician of Forlì, he does his homework after dinner. He has a great aesthetic sense and a flair for business; so he somehow manages to trade the first stereo, the first moped, the first machine; she sees his clothes in the windows in chic shops and makes them the same with a seamstress friend; he dreams of being a stylist, and one day he writes to Giorgio Armani for an interview but they don’t answer him; he is instead hired by a multinational company based in Cesena, Roda, which designs and manufactures agricultural machinery, his first real job when, in the summer months, he worked as a lifeguard and waiter in the bathrooms on the Riviera; then even if he is skinny he discovers the world of gyms, at the time only dumbbells and barbells, and realizes that machines can be made to do better sports, and so in the garage of the family house, he designs the first “Hack Squat”; he will buy it back years later to exhibit it at the Village. It is 1983 and the rest is the story of Technogym (name of a global company, while it was supposed to be called “Sanifort”, like a toothpaste for the elderly).
Innovation Almanac – October 20, 1983
The first and only Italian startup born in a garage: Technogym
by Riccardo Luna
A few years ago Alessandri wrote this story in a book, Born to movebut he tells me that the real title was “L’imbestio”, a Romagna expression that means the sacred fire: “I wrote the first version thinking only of my two children, I wanted them to understand that everything they have today is did a gentleman who started from nothing but had the trouble … “.
Passing this message on to his children and young people is one of the things that worries him the most. Nerio has recently turned 60 but still has wild eyes in a wrinkled face of someone who has never stopped. I tell him: at twenty one has the face he has, at 60 the one he deserves, what story does your face tell? He starts from afar: “The more the years go by, the more I feel the responsibility to leave something to future generations, a legacy. Every week I have breakfast with a group of young employees and every time I tell them: do you feel this urge to create something important that Do you stay? Our parents, in the post-war period, had this civic sense; and so did my generation. Here’s what my face tells at 60, this search continues to leave a mark. While at 20, luckily, you’re a fool, an unconscious, otherwise maybe you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur “.
Technogym has been making sports machines that have become icons for several decades, what mark do you think you have left?
“A corporate culture. Made of listening, humility, curiosity. Do not take anything for granted. Pay attention to details. Strive for continuous improvement. And respect criticism, feedback, which is not a nuisance, but an opportunity to progress. Me. I look for this approach when doing job interviews, I’m not so much interested in resume but character. Instead of interviewing them I tell them: ask me a question. Sometimes they get blown away. They don’t know what to say. Too bad, because questions are important. More than the answers. The questions indicate curiosity, our willingness to continuously change that we call innovation. You see, in my life I have met many champions, Schumacher, Nadal, Ronaldo … The champions all have the same characteristic, they are never satisfied, they are super curious, they constantly want to improve. And if you give them feedback, they thank you; the presumptuous ones, the arrogant ones, those who have vanity to spare, take offense “.
Nerio Alessandri, however, does not feel like a champion. At a certain point, answering another question he will say to me: “I have also stopped saying it unfortunately because every time they start laughing but I feel ignorant, that is, I feel unsuitable, I constantly feel unsuitable, unsuitable in the face of challenges. There are people who took 110 cum laude at university and did masters and in comparison I am a poor fellow, a son of workers, at home we did not even have a telephone and we went to the booth in the square with the tokens; also for this perhaps even today I still feel I still have to learn a lot (in reality he took two honorary degrees, ed) “.
I ask him: in what are you still the one who founded Technogym at the age of 21, and in what have you changed?
“In every moment I still think I have the chance of a lifetime in front of me, the meeting that can change everything. But today I have less patience, I don’t want to waste time with the wrong people. In the past I adapted to everything in order to learn . Now I understand that the time I have left is reduced and therefore I have to select the things to do. Time is the most important resource we have, the most democratic, we all have it, it should not be wasted. We must use it to create our own Our luck. In fact, you become lucky. Luck is the meeting between talent and opportunity and if you are an exceptional talent but you never create the opportunity nothing will happen to you. If you are a good talent but you generate a lot of occasions something will happen. Do you want to know what is the mechanism to get lucky? The first thing is constant training, but before that there is a state of mind, there is hunger, which does not necessarily mean being poor, even if he taught me so much; it means to be curious, intellectually hungry. All the champions are curious and therefore they want to deepen and therefore they study and this generates passion which in turn creates a very important thing, skills; skills generate gratification and at that point there is a crossroads: complacency, very dangerous, the beginning of the end; or obsession. Obsession is everything, some consider it negatively and instead it’s an extraordinarily positive word, it can turn you into a champion. It is at that point that others will help you grow, because alone you are not going anywhere; like when I was in the garage of my house and to load the tools I built without a forklift I had the help of the neighbors … “.
There are two things that amaze in the Technogym story. The first was the ability to continually reinvent oneself: to start from mechanics and arrive, with the latest tools, in the metaverse, with training guided by artificial intelligence.
To explain this passage, Alessandri takes a sheet of paper and draws four consecutive curves: “Anything in the universe, any technology, follows a sinusoidal curve: it grows, consolidates and declines. The problem is to change before the decline: if a product is successful it means say that it is already obsolete. You must have the courage to change when you are at your peak because if you do it too late the decline is inevitable. In the history of Technogym, there are four curves: the moment of mechanics, in the 90s; then the ‘electronics, at the beginning of the 2000s; and again information technology and the cloud, in the 10s; and now we are inserting the contents, the production of personalized training sessions, becoming a media company. There have been four radical changes … “.
The second peculiarity of Technogym is that it has never raised capital to grow like any startup does. As has happened to some recent competitors, such as Peloton, which in Silicon Valley raised almost two billion dollars before entering into crisis with the end of the pandemic.
“When I saw certain figures I was worried, I didn’t sleep there at night. But then I did the math and I realized that they couldn’t hold up with all those investments in marketing, and I said to my parents, they jump … But one what I mean: making a large company in Italy is hard. Do you think Bezos could have founded Amazon in Cesena, and Zuckerberg would have created Facebook according to Cinisello Balsamo? Impossible, instead we did it and without ever taking a penny from investors and do you know why? Because I have a horrible fear of debt. I live in fear of going back to poor. I am afraid of losing the ability to create new things and go back to poor “.
Time is running out. It alludes to the incredible concentrations of power of technology companies, the sadness of the ongoing war, the fear that the toy of the world is being broken by too many injustices, too much greed. But at a certain point, I don’t quite remember what we were talking about, he says: “Let’s talk about happiness. I am convinced that happiness comes through doing. In Italy we spend our time talking, giving opinions. And instead we should simply concentrate on doing. better what we have to do. When you succeed you start to be happy “.
Before saying goodbye, I ask him about a video of his dad: he was in the opening lineup of the Village, but at the last moment Nerio thought about it, “too personal”. What was in that video? “Dad was there, in the famous garage, the day I decided to take all the employees to see it. I was afraid that by going to a structure like the Village we would lose something. Someone said to me: why, does it really exist? Before our arrival, Dad he had gone to fix the last things and our video operator, without warning him, had interviewed him about me. And he, in Cesena dialect, had basically said: Nerio is someone who if he sets out one thing, he does it “.