“Do you remember your, ahem, appreciative remarks to the woman who
marched onto the assembly line? Don’t do that when the Americans are
here. A woman from Italy might laugh; a Michigan girl will sue.”
Beppe Severgnini tries to explain Americans to a bunch of Italian autoworkers at the Fiat-Chrysler plant Melfi, southern Italy.
“Americans are great to work with, but they have their manias, just like
us,” I started out. “They are obsessed by three C’s: control,
competition and choreography. You may think this is odd, but you have to
respect it. After all, the United States is the most powerful country
on the planet.”
… Control
reveals America’s passion for order and predictability. How-to books
date from Benjamin Franklin, who was always quick to spot a market
niche. America is a nation of optimistic self-improvers, convinced that
happiness is above all a question of mind over matter.
The
books also prove that Americans reject the idea that success comes all
at once, without effort or luck. Often, we Italians mistake this for
naïveté, but it actually reflects a love of precision and a desire to
stay in charge of your own life. Don’t mock it.
The
second C-word is competition. Americans love it; we fear it. Americans
are prepared to lose in order to win, in almost every aspect of life. In
Italy — and in most of Europe — we hate losing more than we love
winning and tend to settle for an uneventful draw.
Come
to think of it, competition goes a long way toward explaining the
excellence and excesses of the United States, including the abundance of
colleges, the number of television channels and the financial
instability of the many airlines. You build automobiles here. Your
American colleagues know that these automobiles have to be better than
the ones your competitors make. If they aren’t, it’s only right that you
go bust.
For
a long time in Italy, we thought that back-scratching regulations and
protectionism would save our industry. How wrong we were. Competition in
America is more than a healthy economic precept; it’s a moral
imperative.
The
third word on the list is choreography. In Italy, important events like
presidential inaugurations, national holidays or graduation ceremonies
are slightly boring. Americans are convinced that anything important has
also got to be spectacular, if not plain over the top, and
ear-splittingly loud.
