This week, all of Italy lives and breathes Sanremo.
Five consecutive nights. From 8:30 PM until around 1:30 AM. Then an aftershow where people continue discussing what they just watched.
Roughly 25 hours of live broadcasting — for 24 competing songs.
If you look at it through an efficiency lens, it feels absurd.
Too long.
Too chaotic.
Too full of advertising.
Too many guests who aren’t even musicians.
At first, it almost collapsed in my eyes.
Then I realized something important.
Sanremo is not optimized for efficiency.
It is optimized for ritual.
Ritual vs. Optimization
Modern businesses obsess over:
- KPIs
- cycle time
- sprint velocity
- shipping faster
- cutting meetings
All useful.
But not everything that compounds is measurable in short intervals.
Sanremo works because it creates:
- collective immersion
- emotional investment
- shared cultural memory
- rhythm
It is not a show.
It is a national ritual.
And rituals build long-term cohesion.
The Business Translation
Founders often try to compress everything:
- product launches
- team gatherings
- roadmap planning
- brand storytelling
into the smallest possible time unit.
But some value only emerges when you allow duration.
Deep product design.
Strategic offsites.
Immersion weeks.
Customer onboarding done with care.
These are rituals, not tasks.
And rituals create durable performance.
Non-Linear Time
When you stop counting minutes and start entering presence, time changes.
In those spaces, breakthroughs happen.
Architecture stabilizes.
Ideas mature.
Teams align.
You cannot rush that with pressure alone.
Sanremo reminded me of something simple:
Not everything valuable should be optimized.
Some things must be experienced fully.
And sometimes, slowing down is not inefficiency.
It is infrastructure.
Tutti cantano Sanremo.
