14 - The Italian Canadian of the Rising Sun

Sharp Canada's Giuseppe (Joe) Anzini bridges the gap between Japan and Canada

This elegant man, with penetrating blue eyes, could in a few months become the first non-Japanese president of Sharps Electronics of Canada. But not just that. He could be the first Italian Canadian to ascend to such a prestigious post within the Japanese company giant, a world leader in electronics, from computers to television sets, vacuum cleaners to cellular phones, camcorders to digital cameras.
Giuseppe (Joe) Anzini, a Calabrian from San Giovanni in Fiore (Cosenza), is not shy. "Yes, indeed," he says, "there's a chance I could succeed to Mr. Kazuo Sasaki, Sharp Canada's current president. I'm the VP in charge of operations, so the de facto number two, and since I believe the work I did in these 14 years was good, succession should be a natural fact."
Let's say you have no competitors...
"This is not the problem. Let's say instead that I gained the trust of the Japanese, who are serious people and look for results. I gave results."
Which results?
"First of all I localized this company, which is a multinational all right, but is used to sending Japanese managers to run its subsidiaries all over the world. When I arrived here, the managers were all Japanese, and I was the only 'foreigner'; now there are only five of them. More than that, I proved that, globalization notwithstanding, only local people can truly understand in depth the needs of a local market. Mind you, mine was no polemic argument: the top management in Osaka understood I was not acting against the Japanese, but rather in favour of Sharp. The first to acknowledge this was Mr. Sasaki, the current president, who wanted me as his right-hand man, and with whom I established a loyal collaboration and friendship."
Giuseppe Anzini, 49, came to Canada from Calabria with his family when he was seven. They settled in Montreal, where he got his M.Sc. in Business Administration from McGill University. His first job was with Canadian National Railways, then with Northern Telecom, both in Quebec.
"Northern entrusted me," he says, "with fixing some problems in their Ottawa plant. 'We'll give you two years to get the job done,' they told me, 'then you'll be transferred to Toronto.' Nine months later my job was done, so I came to Toronto where, some years later, I was hired by Sharp. And here I am."
In Toronto, Anzini (married with Caterina who gave him two children, Franco and Sabrina) does not only carry out his work for Sharp, but is also active in the Italian community (he's a member of the Directive Committee of the Mississauga Canadian Italian Association) and teaches (he's a professor of Japanese Management at the University of Toronto).
"In Sharp," he says, "I climbed all the steps of the corporate ladder: responsible for human resources and administration, general manager, VP for commercial activities and finally VP for operations. You can say my career was all within big corporations, which gave me a solid professional background, but I must say I derived a great human experience from a defeat."
You look like a winner: which defeat are you talking about?
"In 1976, in Montreal, I ran for the Union Nationale in the elections. My opponent was Robert Bourassa, Premier of Quebec. I knew it was going to be tough, but I did not hesitate in accepting the challenge. I was defeated, but that election campaign, and the months spent in its preparation, allowed me to connect with real people and their real needs, which did not always reach university halls or the muffled board meeting rooms. With time, once I was hired by Sharp, my association with the Japanese added value to my experience."
What did the Japanese give you, in particular?
"First of all the awareness that Italians are their best counterparts. There are many similarities between these two people: like us, the Japanese work hard, love their jobs and want to have fun. My association with them gave me an opportunity to link our two cultures, because I managed to find traits in common. If you also consider my Anglo-Saxon and French cultures, due to my upbringing in Montreal and living in Toronto, you'll understand why I consider myself luckier than most people. In the age of globalization, I am fully integrated with this concept: the world as one big village where different peoples, markets and cultures manage to interact with each other. McLuhan was right, and maybe his being a Canadian was not by chance: in this multicultural country, the world is really at hand."
You are working for a company that, through electronics, lets the work of men flow, and thus truly puts the world at hand. But this implies that companies need to speedily adapt to globalisation. Did Sharp do it?
"You are posing a problem of corporate philosophy. I'll tell you that I'm working to its solution. It's not easy, but we have to try. In regards to Sharp, - a Japanese multinational and I would emphasize Japanese - you certainly know that in Japan, factories cannot close down, workers have lifelong jobs. But you also know that advanced technology has replaced workers with robots. What are we to do, then, of those workers? In Japan they were transferred to offices, turning them into clerical staff. But this operation made offices swell and became clogged with bureaucracy, slowing everything down..."
I can't follow you.
"Well, these workers-turned-clerks must do something, right? Then work for them must be created, and this means paperwork to be done and examined, i.e. bureaucracy. That's a trivial example, but I think it puts across the idea. The result: Japan, great producer of technology, has industries that routinely recur to paperwork, when a computer could do the work of 100 clerks. If this is the trend in the home country of a multinational, unavoidably the method will be exported to its associates all over the world. If this is clear, then you'll understand my objective to transform Sharp from a company that communicates with paper to one that communicates electronically."
What developments can be foreseen for this project?
"Take our wholesalers, for instance: I want to allow them to check, on their own and in real time, the situation of their sales; via a computer, not paper reports from the company. That's why I've been working since last year on the SAP project, allowing production facilities and wholesale deposits not just to know the commercial and financial situation in real time, but also to implement winning marketing strategies. On the other hand, with e-commerce gaining ground, you cannot afford to lose even one hour in adapting your strategies."
Doesn't e-commerce, by directly linking customers and manufacturers, spell certain death for wholesalers, who were the previous privileged intermediaries between the two?
"In effect, in planning e-commerce this is the big problem. As for Sharp, we are working right now on a balanced strategy. The purpose is to avoid throwing wholesalers out of the market. I have some ideas about this, but since they're still in a theoretical phase I'll keep them for myself. In any case, there's still time: according to recent forecasts, in 2003 only 4.3 percent of commercial transactions will take place over the Internet."
Don't think to 2003. Think to 2023, 20 years later. What will it be like? Will stores, supermarkets, wholesalers, retailers disappear? A market or a supermarket is not just a place for shopping, they're also meeting places.
"No, I don't agree this is likely to happen. Internet transactions will reach maybe 30 or 40 percent of the total, not more. People need to socialize, they cannot avoid staying with the others. I am appalled, even though I work for a big electronics company, when I read that there are people spending hours and hours in front of a computer as if its company could replace that of other persons. Computers deserve respect because they help us in our life, but they're still machines, let's not forget it. Machines that do, but do not think; they'll never have human feelings, in spite of science fiction books and films showing the contrary. But going back to more trivial problems, be assured that e-commerce will not destroy the market."
Why?
"Because a purchase via the Internet is merely one step in a process to come into possession of a given article. Once bought, that article must be delivered, and earlier than that all such articles will have been stored and prepared for shipment. What I mean is that the rest of the process revolving around the sale of a fridge, for instance, cannot be cancelled simply because the model of fridge was chosen and the address and credit card number given over the Internet. E-commerce, instead, forces companies to be truly accountable."
What do you mean?
"I mean that when a company decides to sell its goods through the Internet it must be very attentive and prompt in satisfying demands in a matter of hours: these are the fundamentals of e-commerce. On the other hand, if the company fails to do this, it risks collapsing, because the e-market is extremely volatile: customers can change their supplier with a click of their mouse."
What did you invent at Sharp, in the field of electronics?
"Where shall I begin?"
From something small and sophisticated.
"Here you are: look at this gadget, the size of a cigarette package. It's an Internet view camera, that's its name. It's a camcorder capable of recording for one hour, including sound; but it's also a digital camera that can take 576 pictures. There's no film: everything is recorded on this tiny memory card, one inch by one inch. After recording the movie or the pictures, you can send it or them to anybody: you only need to insert the card in a special floppy disk, which in turn goes into a computer driver, and that's that. No scanners, no decoders, no cables. Do you understand?"
I think I do. And what else does our technological future have in store for us?
"Look at this TV: only one inch thick. It can be hung from a wall like a picture. The screen is based on liquid crystals: in a couple of years it will replace the current monumental screens with their bulky cathodic tube. But the real novelty is another. As you know..."
Wrong, Mr. Anzini: I do not know...
"OK then, as you do not know, the basic component of liquid crystals is glass. For your information I'll tell you that liquid crystals allow visualization of anything generated by a digital process: computers and TV movies, cell phone displays, etc. Well, we've invented liquid crystals based not on glass but on plastics. When we market these crystals there will be a revolution, because they're 10 times as resistant and 10 times lighter than glass-based crystals. As an example: if you take a cell phone and drop it from one metre, it breaks. With plastics-based liquid crystals, it will not."
Interesting, really interesting.
"Yes, but keep in mind they're machines, as perfect as we can make them, but machines, invented by man, who's the universe's unequalled being. Greek philosophers defined man as 'the measure of all things.' They were right, and they still are."


(translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2002-12-22
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2189