Italian manufacturing is alive, and looks to have a future, as does the Italian way of doing business, its approach to production, the market and jobs. Everything is evolving and changing, of course. Some segments are growing, others are only standing still, but the culture of “making things” does not look to be in terminal decline. Industry is changing, sometimes radically and dramatically, but it continues to exist.

The evidence comes from a study by Prometeia and Intesa Sanpaolo presented on 20 May in Milan which takes a close look at trends in the various sectors of Italian industry. It is an important guide to understanding where a large part of the economy is going, but also how the spirit of Italian industry is being transformed and with it the business culture that lies behind decisions to move in one direction rather than another.

The figures for the future are encouraging suggesting that manufacturing should return to growth this year (+1.5%), and continue to grow strongly between 2015 and 2018.

But more significant are the report’s broader considerations. The crisis has caused unemployment and factory closures, but there is more to the picture. “The transformations seen in the last decade have reduced the size of Italian manufacturing, but these have led to a strengthening of industry in various respects. More jobs are concentrated in large companies. Managerial and technical positions have more influence, while a significant productive base of specialist workers and artisans has survived. There has been a noticeable improvement in the quality of Italian exports.” In all this a central role is played by some of the economy’s more important (and traditional) segments: car manufacturing and heavy engineering. We are beginning to see a sort of renaissance of Italian manufacturing, yet to be consolidated but clearly discernible.

Of course Prometeia and Intesa Sanpaolo do not conceal the difficulties. Italian manufacturing has not so much managed change as suffered it and has remained more or less closed to foreign investors. Meanwhile unemployment is no chimera, but a harsh reality. Less efficient firms will continue to go to the wall and the tough competitive environment will squeeze any return to profits. On the other hand the analysts point to a future of “greater commercial and productive internationalization”.

The message however is clear: Italian manufacturing – in its most modern sense – is not shutting up shop. It is evolving and changing, asking questions and responding with new solutions to the challenges of the wider economy and society. With it is changing its culture and values, ideas and behaviour, and the business activities that characterize it. The picture that emerges from the pages of the Prometeia report is one of industry adopting a new and (possibly) winning model

Industry Report 

Prometeia-Intesa Sanpaolo

May 2014

They called it “Space Cowboys”, like the Clint Eastwood film in which a group of elderly astronauts are called back into service for a special mission. It’s the perfect name for the Daimler (Mercedes) programme to promote the return of a hundred pensioners to the company in order to take advantage of their skill and experience in particular areas of the group. Another 390 have been lined up for other needs, so it’s “make way for the elderly” in Germany. And not just at Daimler, but also at Bosch and Otto, and other companies are likely to follow. “Specific knowledge and know-how was at risk in information technology, in the launch of new products, and in taking on particularly challenging foreign markets such as China,” Wilfried Porth, head of human resources for the Daimler group (with 275,000 employees), explained to the media, and while it’s true that young engineers and technicians have particularly advanced high-tech knowledge, the elderly, with years of experience in the company, in research, and in marketing and sales, possess an extraordinarily sophisticated wealth of know-how for which the company feels it has a great need. So it’s an interesting decision and one to be pondered carefully and with an open mind.

The powerful German automotive trade union, IG Metall, has already expressed its disfavour, saying that it takes opportunities away from young people and worsens the generation gap, but German companies seem to want to pay close attention to the results achieved by the Daimler and Bosch programmes.

These developments in Germany should probably be looked at differently from the traditional generational conflict, avoiding the old-vs.-young stereotypes that are fine for daytime talk shows, but irrelevant to the evolving complexities of job markets and the culture of enterprise.

We can, for example, consider the fact that, as the “knowledge economy” comes to the fore, skills acquired throughout years and years of career in the industry should not be lost, lest we waste significant chunks of intellectual and social capital. We should be studying forms of organisation and employee relations that promote new hires being coached by their elders, pensioners with renewed purpose, teaching young employees through on-the-job training. Former engineers, technicians and senior factory workers passing on their practical know-how to new hires with their high-tech training. A hybridisation of viewpoints. A cross-fertilisation of cultures and attitudes. And the benefits are many. The elderly can cost relatively little (with the lower salaries for part-time or temporary work and no social security withholdings); young people can learn their craft without being afraid of the “generational bottleneck”, and the workforce as a whole strengthens, all of which makes for a complex, virtuous passing of the torch from one generation to the next and a forward-looking use of human capital.

A crucial feature of society throughout the twentieth century (promoting values in the workplace, social inclusion, education of the general population, the alignment of rights and duties, and great tension and conflict that led to new equilibrium in labour relations and to innovations in manufacturing and in society as a whole), the factory can also be a place in which a new form of “generational harmony” can be achieved by facing the challenges of handing down values, memories and optimism through labour relations and the culture of enterprise (as also discussed by the philosopher Remo Bodei in his latest book, Generazioni – Età della vita, età delle cose, published by Laterza), and the “culture of industry” can serve as a paradigm for new forms of social transformation.

While it’s true that there is still a strong “gerontocracy” in the Italian economy (as documented in an interesting book by Sandro Catani, published by Garzanti, which looked at the 400 positions at the top flights of Italy’s publicly listed corporations and found an oligarchy with an average age of 65 – the highest in Europe – that is holding back generational change), change is, nonetheless, under way, even within small and medium enterprise, where the family business is evolving towards forms of management that, at least to some extent, leave room for properly trained managers, the generational change is making good headway and doing so in original ways (as documented in the latest issue of the magazine Capital, with its cover story entitled “Generazione 40”).

In any event, the public debate surrounding the metamorphosis of business needs to go beyond gerontocracy and old-vs.-young and take a critical look at what is happening now in Germany with “Space Cowboys” – teaching young people to “cowboy up” when it comes to their future.

To succeed in today’s marketplace, a new business needs one characteristic above all others: resilience. In other words, when all is said and done, the business that manages to progress, to bring about development and create jobs, is the one that is able – when the going gets tough – to respond proactively, to either go back to the “origins” or find a new direction in order to continue to exist.

Resilience is a bit of a cliché in business management these days, but it is also the next frontier in business strategy, one that has everything to do with the culture of enterprise. It’s not just about managing a business differently, but also about seeing the organisation and the very essence of business differently. 

Resilience, a book (in Italian) by Guia Beatrice Pirotti and Markus Venzin, can be of help in this regard in that it provides clear guidelines to understanding resilience as it applies to business and then offers a few key principles to help improve business management for these turbulent times.

The authors explain that the indicators most commonly used in business measure performance over a time period of no more than a year, but increasingly frequently this period is limited to just six months or even just a quarter. If we then add the increasingly rapid pace of turnover within senior management, we see that few companies are able to pursue long-term strategies, and many are stuck focusing on quarterly tactics. This is why, according to Pirotti and Venzin, we need to focus on resilience, but not only on this. The authors say that this capacity is also needed when making decisions in areas such as internationalisation, new investment, brand image, and motivating employees, 

and they give examples taken from a series of interviews from managers of resilient companies such as Carlsberg, Enel, Iveco, ADCF Bank, Hyundai, Sace, and others. They then offer up a number of management tools that can help to turn a productive organisation into a resilient business, tools such as the ability to measure performance, a focus on product authenticity and on customer satisfaction, as well as a focus on geography, long-term strategies, and the ability to fine-tune all mechanisms of organisation. 

But the authors are clear on the fact that making the shift towards resilience is no easy task. In the words of Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, Chapter VI), “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” This is a common condition in many businesses and for many businesspeople faced with “the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them” (ibid.), but we need to start trying.

Resilience. I sette principi per una gestione aziendale sana e prudente (The seven principles of sound, prudent business management)

Guia Beatrice Pirotti, Markus Venzin 

Egea, 2014 

It is true, to a certain extent, that entrepreneurship is an innate talent. That spirit of initiative, the thrill of the challenge, that flair for business and the joy of making something that all true entrepreneurs possess are not things that you learn in school, and yet you can learn to become an entrepreneur in the sense that it does, in any event, require a setting that promotes the discovery and development of the entrepreneurial spirit. We don’t need to go as far back as Max Weber (whose famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a seminal study of the relationship between environment and entrepreneurship), but there can be no doubt that context can do much to help develop the new leaders of industry. And by context we mean various factors, such as education, religion, ethics, social setting, and institutional factors.

In order to better understand some of these aspects, “The importance and role of personal entrepreneurship training in the development of business culture and its challenges”, by Ghorbani Mahmouda and Partonia Soheilab of the Islamic Azad University, Bojnourd, Iran (Departments of Management and of Educational Mangaement, respectively), published just a few days ago in the Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics and Management, makes for an interesting read.

The two authors describe entrepreneurship within an economic system based on the level of motivation and entrepreneurship training and on the allocation of credits and other mechanisms of business growth.  As the authors explain, in order to trigger growth within an economy, “development and promotion of entrepreneurship culture and creating necessary platforms for youth employment in the society seems necessary”. Thus, schools and the education system are important, as is the dissemination of knowledge.

So it’s both nature and nurture, but we need to start young and within the proper setting. This may seem like an obvious observation, but it’s an important one. The culture of enterprise doesn’t arise out of nothing and cannot grow in a vacuum, and what makes this work even more interesting is that it comes out of Iran, a country that is certainly not an easy place in which to do business. But this emphasis on context also applies to Europe, and to Italy in particular.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this article is clear: a business may indeed arise from the mind of an individual, but it can only grow and create jobs and wealth if it finds fertile ground in which to establish its roots.

The importance and role of personal entrepreneurship training in the development of business culture and its challenges

Ghorbani Mahmouda, Partonia Soheilab

Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics and Management

2014, Volume 4, Issue 5

“A new industrial renaissance” is a priority of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for Italy’s term in the presidency of the European Union, and it is important to see how a concept to come out of the debate between economists and proponents of the culture of enterprise (from the American manufacturing renaissance as written about by Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Smith from the Harvard Business School to various studies by the Aspen Institute (Washington, D.C.), the Boston Consulting Group, or McKinsey, not to mention by Confindustria, Assolombarda and the Pirelli Foundation in Italy, as have been featured on the pages of this blog) has finally become a central topic in both political strategy and government planning.’The best manufacturing firms in Italy and elsewhere have reacted to the Great Crisis by combatting the practices of raider finance with strategies involving innovation, quality, creativity, exports, new markets, the green economy, and the social and environmental sustainability of both products and processes, and they have shown that “the new factory” (a blend of manufacturing, research, and high-end services) is the solid core of an economy able to create jobs, wealth and stable growth. Now the political machine is taking note and beginning to take action (through fiscal and economic policies and other reforms) in order to breathe new life into European industry. This is a good move and a potential new direction for a continent in search of greater identity and of more effective responses to the needs of its citizenry.

Renzi says that “growth and jobs are the central values for Europe” and emphasises both the recovery in traditional manufacturing and the need for a new industrial renaissance. In an interview with Time, he reiterated Italy’s role as a leader and as “the locomotive of Europe”, turning around manufacturing through Italian ingenuity because “in its moments of maximum difficulty [Italy] has always found the strength to do the most incredible things”. His thoughts are in line with similar assessments taking shape in France and in other of Europe’s Mediterranean nations, as well as in Great Britain, which is rediscovering manufacturing, and in Germany, which remains Europe’s leading manufacturer, just in front of Italy (such that Flavio Valeri, managing director of Deutsche Bank in Italy, in an interesting interview published by Il Sole24Ore on 8 May, rightly spoke of an axis of excellence in manufacturing between Italy and Germany).

It will take an industrial compact along side an intelligently designed – and perhaps reformed – fiscal compact (taking investment in research, development and innovation out of the calculation of the 3% ratio of deficit to GDP), and it’s also worth heeding the advice of a great economist, and Nobel Prize winner, such as Amartya Sen, who defends the importance of the euro and of the EU, but is critical of the ideological obsession with austerity and defends the strategy of sustainable development.

Romano Prodi, having led the European Commission for a number of years, is all too familiar with both the EU and the world of industry both in Italy and around the world (both as an academic and as a politician) and speaks of the sort of “innovation that creates value” (Il Sole24Ore, 10 May) and, together with Alessandro Ovi, founder of the MIT Technology Review Italia, points to the importance of large corporations (from Pirelli to Ferrari), of small and medium enterprise (businesses like Protocast and Zehus), of business incubators, and of the start-ups that were the focus of a major event concerning industrial innovation at MAST and at Alma Graduate School in Bologna on Sunday and Monday. “Rewarding innovation in business can help awaken the sort of creative spirit that can certainly be found in Italy”, Prodi rightly notes.

Italy and its best enterprises have made great strides in this direction, but more can still be done. Within the EU, international competitiveness is based on innovation, technology and research, as confirmed by a recent book by two economists, Giorgio Barba Navaretti and Gianmarco Ottaviano, “Made in Torino? Fiat Chrysler Automobiles e il futuro dell’industria” (published by Il Mulino), which seeks to demonstrate the return of the central importance of manufacturing in Italy, in Europe and in the western world generally. Manufacturers can succeed, not by pursuing competitiveness based on the cost of labour (the two authors point out that the cost of labour accounts for no more than 5% of a car’s total manufacturing costs), but through competitive advantage that depends on the local availability of specialist labour, services and infrastructure – confirmation of the challenge ahead and the choices that need to continue being made. Indeed, this “manufacturing renaissance” of which Renzi often speaks has to do with high-quality supply chains, with medium-tech enterprise and high-tech services (e.g. broadband), with excellence in education as seen at the polytechnic universities in Turin and Milan, contexts suited to industry (e.g. without excessive bureaucracy), and good culture of enterprise. We can move forward.

A business is made up of individuals, but these individuals need to be understood, and understanding them better, we can manage business more efficiently and more effectively, thereby increasing overall business performance. But this is much easier to say than to actually put into practice.  Of such great relevance in these times of social and workplace tension, of economic alarm bells, of uncertainty about the future and perplexity about the present, the issue of understanding the individuals in an organisation is one that affects all areas of business. It’s a matter of culture, but has an impact on actual production; is founded on humanistic teachings, but is closely tied to more technical fields.

 

This is why – perhaps now more than in the past – business efficiency can also be achieved with the help of philosophy, and it is also what makes Piero Pagnotta’s Tre lezioni di filosofia del management (Three lessons of management philosophy) an intriguing and useful – almost obligatory – read. 

 

With a degree in philosophy and extensive experience working in companies such as Honeywell and Olivetti, Pagnotta has written a real page turner that opens with a bold statement: “It is the individual employees, with their intelligence and through their conditioned choices, that determine the success of the work they do. This is both the starting point and the ultimate goal of the job of manager.” To expand upon this concept, Pagnotta looks at Plato and his ideas about art and writing to lay out a thought process that leads to the best expression of business management, explaining that “in order to understand, a manager first needs to work for an organisation for a long time to then […] grasp its complexity”. In other words, not graduate studies, but practice and lots of hard work is what Pagnotta appears to be saying before moving on to an analysis of the science and philosophy of the 1900s – including the work of Einstein, Kant, Heisenberg, Gödel, Feynman, and Popper – in order to provide other practical recommendations. 

 

“When analysing an organisation of individuals, certain data is needed to understand performance […] but if we also want to assess its potential, its capacity for growth, and its social impact, the numbers start to be more relative, and we need to formulate other assessments.” In other words, the best managers need to know how to deal with uncertainty, and this leads Pagnotta to the third stage of his journey. 

 

“Managing means more than just skills and procedures to be applied and rules to be followed, but also symbols to be created, a passion shared with the rest of the organisation, giving life to a common story that encompasses passion, creativity, planning, sense and sensibility, so as to create an identity, a collective story that needs to be based on recognition, trust and tangible interest in order to continue over time.”  

 

And that’s not all, because, by the end of his book, Pagnotta also touches on more delicate aspects of business and organisation, such as envy, power, status, roles, and favouritism. At the end, he provides an example taken from a great, if ill-fated, Italian organisation: “They had it all, but they were unable to admire the work they had done. They were envious and destructive.” 

 

It’s a book to be read and to be kept close at hand for future reference.

 

 

Tre lezioni di filosofia del management

Piero Pagnotta

Edizioni Nuova Cultura  (e-book), 2013

Understanding complexity is something everyone should strive for, especially in businesses facing, or wanting to face, the international marketplace, but the path to real understanding of a complex landscape is an arduous one, especially – where businesses are concerned – in a constantly evolving marketplace. But in addition to this constant change, businesses also have to deal with the conflict that arises in the marketplace.

A thesis by Chloe Friederichsen, a student at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia (USA), is an interesting work that seeks to analyse both the dense network of relationships between international trade, business management and corporate culture.

Entitled “Culture & Conflict: Intertwined with International Business”, her thesis starts with a statement of fact. Friederichsen writes, “Today international transactions have become a very common entity in the business world. With this newfound trend comes the need to understand the complexities of culture and conflict management in order for an international business to succeed with a competitive edge.”

A business can’t take on a new market without first knowing a great deal about that market, its people, its politics, and the rules at play. This is a fairly obvious statement, but one that is difficult to fully put into practice, and yet the relationships between the way of doing business, the conflict that can arise in international business, and the ability to adapt to and understand the market and the competition are aspects of the problem that need to be understood well in order then understand the causes of success or failure in the global economy.

The work of Chloe Friederichsen is organised into two parts. She first analyses the elements involved in understanding business management and the approach to the marketplace. In order to better understand these aspects, the author looks at the examples of Coca-Cola and Motorola and their experiences in China. The second part of the study then looks at each of the aspects of culture one by one, including religion, ethics, communication, value systems, and how other aspects of culture intertwine to give rise to the various characteristics of a society’s culture. Examples used here include McDonald’s in India, as well as Pepsi-Cola, British Telecom, and IBM.

In the end, Friederichsen reaches an interesting conclusion, that putting together the mosaic made up of different cultures, different markets and the complexities of both is a challenge that we all must overcome, and a quote from Henry Ford sums the entire work up nicely: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

Culture & Conflict: Intertwined with International Business 

Chloe Friederichsen  Senior Thesis Liberty University, Spring 2014

“In times of crisis, a man’s vitality doubles”. This optimistic quote from the great American writer Paul Auster was selected by Silvana Annichiarico, director of the tri-annual Design Museum, as the motto of the exhibit, opened in conjunction with Design Week and the 2014 edition of the interior design show, Salone del Mobile, held this April in Milan. And it was an appropriate choice in that it reflects the best traits of Italian industry: focusing on creativity and innovation, quality and internationalism, in order to find new paths out of a crisis that continues to afflict the domestic market in Italy, but which can be overcome through expansion into foreign markets.

“Salone del Mobile and the renaissance of Italian creativity” were the words of a great, internationally renowned artist, Michelangelo Pistoletto, which capture the sense of the culture and entrepreneurial spirit that increasingly characterize the vitality of one of the pillars of Italian manufacturing (within the context of the country’s key industries of interior design, fashion and agriculture, not to mention industrial automation, a field that also features the entire value chain of woodworking machinery).

“Renaissance” is a bit of a buzzword these days, such as in “manufacturing renaissance” (often mentioned right here in this blog), a term used by economists at Harvard in reference to the US’s decision to begin investing again in manufacturing and “backshoring”, i.e. bringing American manufacturing back to the US after having gone overseas in search of better conditions for production. Many of Italy’s best economists often refer to “industrial pride” and “manufacturing excellence”, as does the industrial federation Confindustria and some of its most active regional branches, such as Assolombarda. Culture of enterprise and creativity. Product quality and production systems. Originality in design. “We’re building a culture of enterprise, not just business”, said Claudio Luti, chairman of Kartell and the head of Cosmit, the organiser of Salone del Mobile.

Other great names from the worlds of culture, architecture and design have echoed Pistoletto’s optimism. Mario Bellini has noted that “here in Milan, we give life to ideas from around the world. Zaha Hadid has said that “Milan is a mandatory stop on the road to learning”, while Doriana and Massimiliano Fuksas have underscored the importance of both innovation and the tradition of craftsmanship. David Chipperfield has confirmed that “Italian small and medium enterprise is achieving unique results”, and Daniel Libeskind has written of “functionality and aesthetics is in [Italians’] DNA”, noting that “Italian design is still competitive on international markets thanks to the industry’s commitment and long history”.

Confirmation can also be seen in the numbers on Salone del Mobile and Design Week: 360,000 visitors to the 2014 edition, up 13% from the previous year, and featuring architects, designers, buyers, business people, and the specialist press, and with 70% coming from abroad, not just within the EU, but also from Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as from the US and the Middle East. Thus, Salone del Mobile has solidified its place as the world’s largest trade show within the industry, and Italy’s entire interior design industry stands to benefit, as it confirms the healthy originality of a situation that still emphasises the unbreakable bond and virtuous circle between idea and product, and between the “culture of planning” and the “culture of product”, the cross-fertilisation between the design office and the factory, the drive for creativity and innovation and the opportunity to turn ideas and prototypes into products that can tackle the marketplace, whether it be an elite niche or the broader consumer-goods market (while never forgetting the importance of design).

Other buzzwords that found a sounding board at Design Week and that show the way forward for the interior design industry in Italy were sustainability, innovation and training. It all starts from the tradition of craftsmanship, while maintaining a close relationship with the latest production technologies such as the rapidly evolving world of 3D printing. While working on making products and production processes “greener”, emphasis is being placed on materials, especially wood, but also plastics, resins and metals, as well as on how much research labs and other industries have discovered and developed, from new alloys to more flexible, more resistant and lighter compounds, and studies are looking into the positive relationship between boutique firms and large-scale factories, between sophisticated research and the most promising trends in high-value production. And within this landscape, training can play a key role in preparing new designers, chemists and factory workers who know their way around nanotechnologies, as well as in bringing the existing workforce up to speed with the latest discoveries in the world of high-tech.

With its interior design district in Brianza and its connections with Italy’s two other production powerhouses, Veneto and Marche, Milan is at the very core of this strategy. Here you will find manufacturing and a set of expert services for the world of interior design, beginning, of course, with the exhibition services. There is an international-level polytechnic school that specialises in architecture and design and a robust collection of other universities with excellent schools of economics, not to mention the human science faculties that are so essential to sophistication in creativity. There’s finance (which will prove particularly useful if it can figure out how to better meet the needs for growth of small and medium enterprise and of start-ups in particular). There’s a dynamic media and communications industry and a vibrant presence of contemporary art, another key to stimulating innovation. In short, you’ll find everything you need to boost Italian manufacturing and give it even greater opportunities for internationalisation.

There is both theory and practice, certainty and surprise, whether in be in business, in politics, in the economy, throughout history and in every field of human endeavour, and, often, practice surpasses theory and does so through creativity and complexity. Surprise overwhelms certainty to such an extent that it becomes almost meaningless, and this also happens within organisations, which are made up of men and women, not operating manuals giving instructions to machines. This is why even corporations have culture, as unpredictable as it may be. 

 “Parkinson’s Law”, a work by Cyril Northcote Parkinson published for the first time in 1955 and recently rereleased as an e-book, can help us to better understand that reality is much more complex (and, at times, more beautiful) than theory,  as well as to understand how such a complex topic can be tackled with targeted gentleness.

The first line of the book may appear cryptic: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In actual fact, it points to a condition that is common in a great many organisations, i.e. that the complexity of the organisation is independent from that which needs to be done. In today’s quest for maximum efficiency and the greatest possible reduction of costs, the quest to understand organisational complexity – and the various traps hidden therein – passes, in part, through a reading of Parkinson, who describes it all in ten chapters, starting with a definition of “Parkinson’s Law” before looking at the various aspects of the organisation related to personnel, hiring mechanisms, the formation of opinion, operating instructions, the actual layout of the offices, company administration, its power structures, the symbols of power within the company, and the various stages of an individual’s working life. 

Written for large (public and private-sector) organisations, “Parkinson’s Law” points to the risks that all organisations face as they grow, but also to many of the potential causes of the current inefficiencies in those organisations, and all with a healthy dose of good British humour.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a book (of just over a hundred pages) that made just about everybody angry, but which is an inimitable example of the culture of enterprise at the highest level, featuring a light, easy-to-read tone and yet dense with analysis from the field. It is an analysis which has been enriched, nearly sixty years since its first edition, with a series of quotes that reflect, to a certain extent, the heritage Parkinson left behind and which provide further food for thought. One such quote reflects Parkinson’s spirit : “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” (Voltaire) 

La legge di Parkinson 

Cyril Northcote Parkinson

Monti&Ambrosini, March 2014

Corporate culture and the culture of enterprise are complex concepts. They aren’t created on demand, and they don’t evolve along a standardised path. It’s simply not possible, given that a culture is made up of people, of individuals, not of machines. Although easy enough to understand on the surface, culture of enterprise is actually a set of approaches, ideas and interpretations of reality that is not easy to define and even less so to fully analyse.

“Influence of corporate culture on innovative activity of employees of the enterprises”, recently published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is of help in this regard precisely because it seeks to define the complexity of corporate culture. V. N. Belkin, N. A. Belkina, O. A. Antonova and N. A. Luzin, the authors of the study, seek to understand corporate culture as a system of culture, morals and aesthetics which is introduced into the employees’ working lives by the employer and by its CEO. It is based on this system that the rules and regulations of employee relations, customs, traditions and company habits are formed, as well as on business and technical knowledge, moral and social principles, and even aesthetic guidelines given that the company’s image is reflected in its culture and vice versa, but it is also formed by the behaviour and interpersonal relationships that are established within the organisation’s walls. According to the study, a company creates a complex, varied and multifaceted cultural system out of production and quality procedures, methods of employee organisation, electronic and hard-copy catalogues, and its various actions of social responsibility, and this culture needs to be seen as a whole in order to understand where the business itself is headed.

But that’s not all, because the study then looks into the fact that corporate culture is connected with the general culture of the nation in which the organisation operates, both reflecting it and, to a certain extent, also contradicting it, and it is also possible to see conflict between conflict between the cultural values of the organisation and those of its employees.  Taking Japanese firms, and Toyota in particular, as case studies, the authors continue by explaining that high levels of employee innovation are not achieved through separate systems of material and moral incentives, but through the whole system of labour relations that is built upon the foundations of corporate culture.  This is a goal that is certainly difficult to reach, but one which can truly be the way forward for many businesses, particularly in times of economic difficulty such as the crisis that we continue to face to this day.

One of the key ideas that emerge from the article is that people must be at the heart of corporate culture, not just the goods and services produced.

Influence of corporate culture on innovative activity of employees of the enterprises.

Belkin, V. N.; Belkina, N. A.; Antonova, O. A.; Luzin, N. A.

Russian Academy of Sciences, Economy of Region / Ekonomika Regiona.

Mar. 2014, Issue 1, p184-195. 12p.

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