Sometimes, environments outside your bubble allow you to speak more freely than in front of an expert but disapproving audience. Eager to see if I can catch fresh fish, I attend a talk about creative industries organized by BCD at Juno House (an elegant club located in the old flour mill on Aribau street) with the general director of Penguin Random House, Núria Cabutí, and the editor of Edhasa and president of the Catalan Publishers' Guild, Daniel Fernández. The talk begins with a brief but interesting linguistic dispute (and the event ends up being held in Catalan) which links to the fact that "Barcelona is the capital of publishing in Catalan and Spanish". "There is no other industry that, from Catalonia, leads as the publishing sector leads", highlights the event's presenter, the publicist Enric Jové. "Well, it has been difficult for us to get the Ministry of Industry to understand that we are an industry. The book's business volume in Spain is 3,000 million euros. In a very good year, Spanish cinema grosses 80 to 100 million. But they have the Goyas and a brutal propaganda machine —says the president of the Guild—. However, we are an industry that has intellectual prestige. That's why Amazon started selling books".

The torrential rain made the presenter's metaphor easy to grasp. The downpours that accompanied the first day of the Círculo de Economía Annual Meeting this Monday afternoon were a clear example of the geopolitical disasters that Catalan companies must navigate at the present time. To answer the question of how they do it, the event brought together the top executives of three globalized companies based in Barcelona—Mango, Fluidra, and Penguin Random House—to understand how they manage their operations at a time when US President Donald Trump can shake up global trade with just a post on his social media.