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An Offer for Uncle Warren Buffett
Ferdinando Frega
A former Gillette Italy manager writes to Warren Buffett with a personal debt to settle — and an offer of one dollar.
The seven foundational books of Gillette Narrative are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
ATLAS OF A BLADE
You arrived here, found gillettenarrative.com, and your first question is probably:
What the hell is this?
That may be the smartest and most common question you can ask. The problem is that I don’t completely know the answer myself, and I happen to be the founder and owner.
Still, since we are talking about stories, let me tell you something that may help both of us understand. The world is immense, and human beings possess a capacity unlike anything else in nature: the ability to create the opposite of what is expected, the improbable, the unpredictable.
In short, the world occasionally produces someone you would never expect to exist, and yet there he is.
As it happens, that someone is me.
Ferdinando Frega.
If you are wondering where to begin.
I want to know who you are → I Caught the Fish PDF
I want the story behind the blade → International
I want to understand the architecture → Genesis
The six doors of the corpus.
Thirty-three language editions of one saga. Behind them, eight bodies of work — real companies, real rivalries, and the people who lived them from the inside: When Bic Met Gillette · Wilkinson, Gillette’s Nephew · L’Oréal Through Gillette · The Day Gillette Said Yes · The Unfinished Self · The Missing Piece · The Patient Saga · The People Who Stayed.
Eight territories, eighty stories: The P&G Saga, The Gillette Company Saga, Gillette From Wall Street, Before Everything, Where Worlds Begin, Step Inside, The Invisible Structure, Past The Edge. Thirty-three languages, five of them open.
One hundred and one books in six groups: Roots & Memory, People & Relationships, Business & Brands, Power & Society, Fiction & Imagination, Frega Dalmata 101.
Seventeen volumes in four parts, on the Vatican, the Christian tradition and institutional memory. One archive, in thirty-three languages.
Where the books leave the page — MEN’S GILLETTE STORY, the life of one Gillette man, staged in image.
Biography of Ferdinando Frega and the address to write to, in thirty-three languages. Write in any of them — a human reads every message.
MY MOTHER’S GESTURE
From the day I was born, all it took was a look.
She never needed to speak.
She never needed to raise her voice.
I always understood what she meant.
That quiet discipline came from her father,
who shaped her roots but never changed her character.
She was simply herself.
Then, in 1985, Mother Gillette took me under her wing.
And, almost as if by magic, she followed the very same rule.
A glance.
Few words.
A world of meaning.
That is how I learned that the most important relationships
are not the ones that speak the most.
They are the ones that understand each other without speaking at all.
Goodbye, Mom.
The text above is the Amazon-compliant version. The truth is below.
The gesture of my mother’s I cannot hide is this: she used to let off the silent ones, then start laughing, and within seconds the whole family was running for the door. Well, that was her — an unpredictable woman, but as good-hearted as I am.
My father’s little frame.
A small piece of our history.
I never expected to reach the world.
Yet thirty-three languages may place these stories within reach of nearly 90% of humanity.
I had no other means than doing it from Calabria.
Welcome to Gillettenarrative.
— BLADEFREGA