Ivan Porccino at a visit to Georgia Military Institute
Twenty years ago I worked for a big American company that
bought a big Brazilian company. As a result of this deal Millennium Inorganic
Chemicals acquired a manufacturing plant, a sales office and a mine in Brazil;
I got a friend I have kept in touch with ever since. I recently met Ivan for
dinner in New York.
When we met in Sao Paulo in 2000 Ivan Porccino was a 27-year-old
junior sales guy who knew lots of people in Sao Paulo and could help his
American colleagues like me navigate the biggest city in South America. We worked together in arranging a big event
for our CEO to talk to all of our new customers through the acquisition.
Ivan seemed to know everyone and languages of Brazil’s
biggest communities. So whomever we
needed to talk to, Ivan could talk to them in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and
Italian, then talk to me in English.
Although Ivan saw his future in international business, he was also
interested in philosophy, history and read great books in all the languages he
could speak.
When we were stuck in Sao Paulo cabs going slower than Amish
buggies we could talk about whether Hume was right about free will, whether
Adam Smith, John Locke and the philosophical Scots were the true beginning of
the modern world, and if Dostoevsky saw the world most clearly of all the
Russians.
Ivan was back in New York to take over a major commodity
chemical shipping operation. He sees it as the next stepping-stone toward a top
job in international commerce in South America. In his eyes, America creating
tariff barriers is bad for the world, but it creates opportunities for other
countries that live in the shadow of the world dominance of the U.S. For Ivan, America is the greatest and most
brilliant sociological experiment in the history of the world, and it is
currently being squandered.
But the long game for 47-year-old Ivan is to get his teenage
kids through University then have more time to spend with philosophy and
literature. He may retire before he’s 60. After we talked about business, we
were back to talking about Dostoevsky and Machiavelli, because they are the
authors that see the evil as well as the good inside all of us.
By the way, dinner was Japanese because what else would a
North and a South American eat in New York City?
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