It is a known fact that knowledge circulates in companies but it is now more important than ever to understand how this knowledge spreads and, above all, how to create it and make it circulate better. This is the area of so-called shared knowledge and of knowledge management, that set of corporate processes, attitudes, routines and methods which increase the level of common knowledge and information among those who effectively spend a good part of their time in the company. Shared knowledge is a difficult process which requires careful and shrewd management, unusual for most companies. A transformation of the same production culture which should permeate all companies.

It helps therefore to read La conoscenza partecipata: nuove pratiche di knowledge management [“Shared knowledge: new knowledge management practices”], the latest opus by Dunia Astrologo and Federica Garbolino (the former a lecturer in knowledge management and organisational communication at Turin university and Politecnico, the latter a partner with Coreconsulting), which bases on the idea of considering knowledge management not as a technique but as a process which has to involve people. Easy to say, complicated to do, as what is defined summarily as a sharing approach requires a new way of managing relations and communication with people. The goal to be achieved is the possibility of creating in the firm efficient and fast decision-making processes and solutions within easy reach as well as enabling the firm to compete more efficaciously.

The work by Astrologo and Garbolino, however, is not just technical reasoning. The first part does cover the main theories on the subject yet the second part analyses specific cases basing on the observation of the potential offered by the new technologies and the Web. The cases of Eni, Tyres Campus Pirelli, Sea-Aeroporti di Milano and Selex Elsag are examined in depth.

The introductory part of the book forms the general basis: “most knowledge management initiatives implemented by organisations fail because they do not take into adequate account the emotional, psychological and social needs of individuals”.

La conoscenza partecipata: nuove pratiche di knowledge management

Dunia Astrologo, Federica Garbolino

Egea, June 2013

Multinationals heedless of their host areas and societies. Production bulldozers concentrated on results, out of step with the context. This is the image which often goes with MNEs, i.e. those large companies with locations scattered throughout the world, with globalised production and possibly a strong corporate culture. However they too ultimately become involved in the debate between local and global, which opens up the way to the need for a rethink in strategies and approaches towards economic growth. Territorial focus, in a geographical and cultural sense, becomes an important cultural stance and a positive means of growth also for large groups.

This is the explanation given by Kurt Pedersen, Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen and Gert Tinggaard Svendsen (from the University of Southern Denmark and University of Aarhus in Denmark respectively) in Multinational Enterprises and Social Capital as Location Factor: A Review, published in August in Business and Management Research, in which they trace a map useful for understanding the paths which link up MNEs to the areas where they are located, via social capital, i.e. that particular combination of culture, technology and sociality which is a feature of every territory.

If MNEs, the authors explain, are often understood to be particularly “volatile” enterprises with respect to the territories where they are located, so-called social capital is a potential tool for reducing the level of volatility. This is a renewable source, within easy reach, the manifestation of the corporate culture of a specific country, a substratum which is invisible yet which undeniably shapes production in economic and social terms. The reference for those large companies, namely MNEs, who wish to go beyond the traditional stereotype which cages them in.

The work by the three Danish scholars contains reasoning on a vast scale over the issue and a careful analysis of what has already been processed. The three academics wrote that their review suggested that social capital can be the missing link and a concept useful also in the area of direct foreign investments and in the management of multinationals.

Multinational Enterprises and Social Capital as Location Factor: A Review

Kurt Pedersen, Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen

Business and Management Research, Vol. 2, No. 3; 2013

It was an ode to Italian excellence and international prestige for the country’s culture and our particular approach to science, not to mention an implicit indication of strategy: Italy’s future lies it the development of the country’s cultural heritage, in Italian creativity, and in the nation’s ability to construct and disseminate research and innovation. In his speech for the appointment of Claudio Abbado, Elena Cattaneo, Renzo Piano and Carlo Rubbia as senators for life, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano was very clear, as was his explicit reference to the lesson of Luigi Einaudi (who had, in his time, appointed great intellectuals such as Arturo Toscanini, Umberto Zanotti Bianco, and Trilussa as senators for life).  Institutional roots and a forward-looking Office of the President. Memories. And a high-profile political reference insisting, convincingly, on the need to bring a much-awaited end to government after government cutting spending on culture, education and research, thereby compromising the future of the new generations and the proper development of the nation.

With this speech, Napolitano embodies the best in Italian culture of enterprise. The new sources of competitiveness lie in the quality of human capital, in social capital (the relationships of skills; the ability to work together, which continue to characterise the best in widespread capitalism; the territory, districts and networking), in “innovation capital”. Despite it all, Italian industry has managed to survive through these years of great crisis only by promoting innovation in products and processes, by challenging the competition on international markets, and by taking advantage of that particular Italian trait that is a constantly changing mix of design, quality, business sophistication, and resilience to change— the result of a culture and of a type of intelligence that keeps pace with the times and looks to the future.

Bruno Arpaia and Pietro Greco, in their book La cultura si mangia! (published by Guanda), offer up data in this regard that provide some food for thought. In this work, the authors refer to the “triangle of culture” (as defined by Umberto Eco) and its important insights into the economy. The three points of this triangle are: a) the cultural industry of design, craftsmanship, the visual arts, audio-visual media, publishing, entertainment, and new media; b) the full cycle of education and learning, from elementary school through to secondary school, university and then life-long learning; and c) scientific research, technological development and the production of high-tech products and services.

These are the pillars of development in many countries around the world—from the US to China, from Korea to Germany and on to Brazil— and they already underlie a large part of the world’s economy. Indeed, the goods and services of this system of production based on scientific research (the whole world of high-tech) account for 30% of global GDP. The creative industry is worth another 15% of GDP. Education, roughly 6%. In other words, over half of the world’s GDP is based on “Eco’s triangle”. It is the knowledge economy, and a challenge for Italy and for Europe as a whole—an essential tool in the new frontier of “record manufacturing” and in retaining competitiveness. Thus far, Italy has responded poorly, investing just 1% of GDP in research and cutting investment in education—largely coming out of the salaries of school and university personnel—year after year. Conversely, the other major European nations, from Germany to France, have increased spending in these areas in what Massimo Sideri (in Corriere della Sera of 1 September) calls the “cocktail of innovation” or the “trilateral network”: industries that invest; universities that conduct research and education to train highly-skilled students; and a series of other conditions created by governments and public bodies to favour start-ups, starting with both physical and intangible infrastructures (e.g. the Silicon Valley in the US, London’s Tech City, the Silicon Wadi in Israel, and other high-tech districts in India, in China and in Russia). These are examples that we would finally learn to follow, as we have now also been reminded by the senators for life appointed by Napolitano.

In business, we produce and we talk. We work and we meet. Now more than every, a company is a place where information is shared and interests coalesce and so is a source of knowledge, news and communication. We must now increasingly think in terms of the “open enterprise”, of dialoguing with the marketplace. The world is changing, but not all businesses have been able to fully grasp the scope of this change. As technology evolves, social networking and the availability of convergent, connected devices that cost less and are smaller, more powerful and more versatile are constantly challenging business people in new ways.

To navigate these waters, we need new maps and new compasses, such as the book L’impresa nell’era della convergenza – Da emittente di messaggi a nodi di conversazioni (The enterprise in the age of convergence – From broadcaster of messages to a node of conversation), by Luigi Ferrari, Massimo Bartoccioli and Mario Ruotolo (all experts in business communication and instructors at IULM, Università Cattolica in Milan, and the University of Milan).

The underlying assumption of the three authors is that the change we are currently witnessing is about more than just an ability to use new technologies. We are also seeing a dense interweaving of aspects of culture and relationships that are crucial in business, particularly concerning the evolution of the skills and mentality of the individual consumers as they become increasingly capable, autonomous explorers who readily reject companies that are unable to adapt to change.

The book—which features a contribution by Nando Pagnoncelli (President of IPSOS)—takes a close look at the need for businesses to make profound changes in their approach to the market, away from what the authors feel to be a still all to common stance of opposition to the consumer and towards a more open dialogue with the market. As the authors explain, “The views and analysis in this work, particularly concerning the evolution of public opinion, the growing phenomenon of online sharing and the transparency and immediacy of information available to all free of charge, lead us to believe that this culture can be rapidly embraced by the most forward-looking organisations, those that have already felt the winds of change and have placed the strengthening of their mission and their responsibility towards the generations to come at the forefront of their strategic organisational and financial decisions.”

L’impresa nell’era della convergenza. Da emittente di messaggi a nodo di conversazioni

Luigi Ferrari, Massimo Bartoccioli, Mario Ruotolo

Unicopli, June 2013

Local and global have become virtually indistinguishable. It’s become a given that, when a business looks to expand abroad, they have to adapt to different social and economic contexts—often very different from those of their home nation—and must do so in a hurry. This is the only real path to growth, but it’s a path to be followed in measured steps, taking with you the essence of your roots, the heart of your own culture of enterprise, while being able to make the best of the new markets and the essence of other business cultures, particularly when you head abroad to do more than just sell your wares.

Nonetheless, what is truly happening is need of greater study in order to understand it fully, because success comes from a delicate balance that changes from one company to the next and from one place to another.

Tamara Katharina Kürzdörfer and José Carlos Santana Lopes have made their own contribution in this direction with their thesis for the Masters in Business Administration programme at the Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. The work, published in May, seeks to understand the effects of transferring cultural and organisational models of a given business to other countries and other cultures. As the authors explain, “it is crucial to transfer […] already developed business models to other countries with different cultures in order to keep a competitive advantage as well as a strong position in [the] corresponding industry.”

Entitled “Cultural Influence on the Success Factors of Business Models”, the thesis goes beyond a mere analysis of previous studies to also analyse the case of Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE), which transferred its model to Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. This exploration of Volvo’s range of experiences proves two things according to the authors. The first is that “the heart of the whole business model” of an organisation as important and as structured as Volvo is not influenced by the national culture of an individual country. The second is that the national culture of a given country can influence the success of a business model, but limited to certain factors. It is this fragile alchemy that comes about when a business moves into a new setting that can lead to the success or failure of a great many enterprises, and this work out of Jönköping offers up some proof.

Cultural Influence on the Success Factors of Business Models

Tamara Katharina Kürzdörfer & José Carlos Santana Lopes

Jönköping International Business School – Jönköping University, May 2013.

Abbot Ferdinando Galiani, the Neapolitan economist very popular in French enlightenment salons, maintained that markets are conversations. This is the phrase used in the opening of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the book by Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger which in 2000, with its passionate supporters and harsh critics, attempted to define the new era of Internet communication which turned marketing and corporate cultures upside down. It maintained that firms have to ask themselves where their corporate culture ends and, if it ends before the community starts, then they have no market. The train of thought is fascinating and the relationship between the lucid awareness of one of the finest brains of the eighteenth century in Italy and the vision of US hi-tech environments confirms the degree of strength the European cultural and philosophical tradition can still have in uncertain times in which past and future have to build new synergies for development.

“Conversations”, therefore. Abbot Galiani used, like all cultured people of that time, an elegant French which won over Madame Louise d’Épinay, Rousseau’s patroness. Today the language of markets is English or, more precisely, that meagre hybrid of British English and American English which allows people in finance, trade and business to talk to and understand each other from Hong Kong to New York, London to Mumbai, Qatar to Singapore and so on, globalising. A sort of contemporary sabir, the language (a blend of Italian and Arab dialects, Spanish, French and Greek) which over the centuries had allowed merchants and sailors to understand each other along the shores and in the ports of the Mediterranean.

English, therefore. Top language on markets in the global world. A language that needs to be known, spoken well and considered carefully and respectfully on account of its function in relationships, information and communication. A business language and an essential language (in the dual sense of its unavoidable usefulness and also the fact that it is reduced to the minimum of the terms that are indispensable for exchanging goods, property and services). And also the language of fundamental scientific relationships and international relations.

Here it is worthwhile stopping a moment to reflect on why one language is much more than a means of economic and political exchange. It expresses history, culture, personal and social values, ideas, habits and customs. It bears witness to complex identities, ways of seeing power and faith and also law, hope and love. It reveals projects for building and managing communities. A language is life and therefore a mobile and variable structure with its roots and contemporary side.

Italian business is flexible, innovative, creative and capable of winning over markets not because our entrepreneurs speak English (they have to speak it, but that’s not where their strength lies) but above all because they have a multiple cultural, artistic and social history behind them, filled with imagination. All this cultural heritage is manifested in a language, Italian. A language to be saved and valued therefore, both in schools and at work.

And conversation? In English, around the world, yet with national languages as a background present at the same time as an indispensable value. Good Italian multinational companies know, because in fact they are used to the intelligent Italian flexibility and the importance of culture, creativity and imagination (expressed above all in national languages), that you need to be “Brazilian in Brazil, Turkish in Turkey, Chinese in China”, “resilient”, therefore, and adaptable to change. The richness and competitiveness of Italian entrepreneurship and management lie in fact in Italians’ ability to free themselves of the patterns of managerial culture with an Anglo-Saxon imprint which until recently was prevalent (and today in serious hegemony difficulties after the great crisis of financial rapaciousness born in London and New York). Of caring for and promoting, in Italian business, the values, cultures and languages of the countries where we go to invest, export and build factories and service structures. A small Italian supremacy which has to be sustained and maintained.

These days captains of industry are definitely captains courageous, even if care is needed in order not to overly idealise figures who, although important, deal with a variety of situations and human types. It is however crucial to understand how to “give out commands”. Increasingly in firms, and elsewhere, commands are given not through authority but rather through authoritativeness.

Having Niccolò Machiavelli as tutor is without doubt the dream of many. This dream has now partly come true with Machiavelli per i manager. Dalla mente più acuta del Rinascimento, massime e sentenze a uso della vita moderna nelle aziende e fuori [“Machiavelli for managers. From the sharpest mind of the Renaissance maxims and sentences for use in modern living in firms and elsewhere”] by Elena and Luigi Spagnol. This is a short book, just over one hundred pages, filled with Machiavellian turns of phrase, which can accompany those who every day have to manage, decide, valuate, prepare, promote – in a word “give the commands” in firms.

Also taking into account how the “boss”, the captain of industry, is often seen, rightly or wrongly, by his staff. This is why the approach to reading the book given by Piero Ottone in his preface is both appealing and accurate: “in the sixteenth century the aristocracy ruled: now the lords of the economy rule, the men of industry and managers of finance. The cast has changed yet the script is the same. The new prince is the head of a firm. The fate of those who work for him, their fortune or their disgrace, depends on his decisions and possibly on his whims. He often has absolute power. Around him therefore the courtesan mentality spreads. When in the morning he enters his company building, which is the equivalent of the old castle, when he sits in his chair behind his desk, which is the equivalent of the throne, the atmosphere in the corridors and in the offices immediately changes: there are those who hope to meet him, who anxiously await his call, those who fear him and hate him. There are the courtesans ready to worship him, the infidels who weave a plot because the dilemma, for every careerist around, is inexorable: you either win his favours or dethrone him. Tertium non datur”. Machiavelli, therefore, is prescribed reading for manages and entrepreneurs too, called on to perform increasingly difficult tasks. It was Machiavelli who wrote in his Istorie Fiorentine that it is easier to learn to obey than to command.

Machiavelli per i manager. Dalla mente più acuta del Rinascimento, massime e sentenze a uso della vita moderna nelle aziende e fuori

Elena Spagnol, Luigi Spagnol

Ponte alle Grazie, 2012.

Consideration of work and production, their locations and the people who embody them, appears increasingly as a founding factor of a different approach to the company and its culture. Work seen as creativity and capacity of manufacture, as initiative and innovation, appears as a lens, somewhat neglected to date, for observing how firms today, after the orgy of computerisation and financialisation at all costs, succeed not only in riding out the recession but also in creating in any case wealth. It is corporate culture which becomes work culture, or rather ties again threads partly broken with that vision of production which, until some time ago, belonged to great entrepreneurs.

It is important therefore to understand how managers can consider work today and, more generally, the role of the so-called “human capital” in the company. Also in small to medium-sized firms which are in actual fact those which make up the core of industrial production, facing up to larger companies. This was the goal which led Lidia Galabova (from the Technical University of Sofia) and Linda McKie (Durham University) in their The Five Fingers of My Hand: Human Capital and Well-Being in SMEs, just published in Personnel Review. The more specific aim of the study is that of understanding the attitude of managers towards “human capital” and well-being in firms, understood as factors which affect the results of the same firm. The study is based on the data collected from 42 semi-structured interviews with managers of SMEs in areas of growth in the services industry. The research was carried out in three countries of the European Union: Scotland (UK), Finland and Bulgaria.

The result obtained by the two researchers is only apparently banal. The managers of small and medium-sized firms are naturally interested in skills and experience as key elements of the “human capital”. Yet willingness, ability to learn and enthusiasm are, as explained in the research, often considered more important. All this then converges into that “well-being” which in many cases succeeds in making the difference between one firm and another.

The Five Fingers of My Hand: Human Capital and Well-being in SMEs

Lidia Galabova, Linda McKie

Personnel Review, vol. 42, 6, 2013.

“Kalòs kai agathòs”, the relationship between the beautiful and the good, aesthetics and ethics, is an awareness rooted in Western culture. In times of metamorphosis other relationships also have to be strengthened, those between the beautiful and the useful, the good and the productive, aesthetics and competitiveness. Playing on the creative dimension of sciences, philosophy and literature and on the search for new forms (therefore new materials, new products, new fictions) and on the relative technologies, processed not so much as techniques as above all thought and language. A contemporary side which is historically aware and polytechnic in design terms. Steve Jobs maintained that he had found out that large companies took aesthetics seriously as it puts over a message of how the company sees itself. Reintroducing, possibly unknowingly, a thought by Adriano Olivetti, contained in the speech given at the opening of the Pozzuoli plant in 1955: “facing the most distinctive gulf in the world, this factory is elevated with respect to the beauty of the setting and so that beauty is a comfort in daily work”.

A homage to external beauty and also an assimilation of beauty – aesthetics and function in fact. The proof lies in the new factories built in recent years in Italy: Maserati, Ferrari, Tod’s, Lavazza, Diesel, Cucinelli (“high creativity will save these generations and the next”) and Pirelli, with a new plant in Settimo Torinese for producing tyres featuring “premium” products – top of the range and excellent quality thanks to sophisticated state-of-the-art robotic technologies) and a “backbone”, a structure designed by Renzo Piano to house research labs, offices, facilities, libraries, spaces for meetings and leisure, a glass and steel parallelepiped four hundred metres long, filled with light and opening onto the two production plants alongside it, with a roof of solar panels. All this surrounded by five hundred cherry trees. An attractive factory in fact, where working is pleasant and therefore more productive and more effectively productive. In a “sustainable” context, not only in environmental terms (the factory has reduced water consumption and the energy comes renewable sources) but also in social terms. As Piano explains, “we staked on interpreting sustainability as a language and not just as a technique to be applied in a more or less appropriate way to a container designed differently”. In this case too design culture and product culture are combined in an original way. In the factory in fact, but not just in the factory.

Piano’s reasoning can in fact be repeated also for the latest of his works, Muse, the science museum in Trento, opened on Saturday 27 July. Glass, wood, steel, concrete, an exhibition and research structure, a collection of materials to narrate nature and human intervention. “A junction between research and business”, according to the management of Muse, built on the site of an old industrial plant (formerly producing components for Michelin tyres) and suitable for representing the change from the old industrial economy to the season of the “knowledge economy”, which enervates production activities that need, in terms in fact of local competitiveness, to take a leap forwards in terms of cultural, technological and scientific capabilities.

A science museum therefore as a means of narration which links up knowledge, training and production. A system opening outwards an area, Trentino and north-east Italy, a strong manufacturing mission. An incentive to build, over time, unusual links between science and its applications.

There is in fact a close link in this between places of production and places of representation. Piano is an excellent interpreter of this. His works, such as “the beautiful and sustainable factory” and the museum described here contain not only the contemporary version of “kalòs kai agathòs” but also the indication of the possible good future of Italy: the creation of quality has both a technological and poetical spirit.

The future also involves the rebirth and the consolidation of a new humanism, focused on humankind and on everything, on the implications of the economy which are not just figures but also people and an enterprising spirit. It is said that we have to break the mould and take a leap forwards (not into the void) and use our imagination with feet planted firmly on the ground. This is the new approach which is becoming increasingly widespread in response to the crisis that began in 2008, to the shortfall in high finance, to seeing production and business as something else with respect to manufacture and individual initiative. All this also involves men and women capable of seeing past their noses and of taking the place of those specialists who in actual fact appear as the “educated ignorant”.

This is what Giuliano da Empoli, writer and president of Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, has done in his Contro gli specialisti. La rivincita dell’umanesimo [“Against Specialists. The Victory of Humanism”] which represents a mental adventure in all areas of human knowledge: from art to material production, from history to modern politics, from philosophy to the economy, via computer technology, finance, sport and much more besides. The book by da Empoli – less than 150 pages for reading in one go – tells how specialists in all areas have impoverished the future of society, production and labour and how, instead, today there is a sort of return victory by those – businessmen, politicians, economists, scientists and philosophers – who succeed in reasoning and acting, looking not at the details but at the entire movement of the reality in which they live and work. There is talk therefore in the book of bananas and ketchup (find out the reason why by reading the book) and also of Ortega y Gasset, Aristotele, Smith, Leonardo da Vinci, Taylor, Jobs and many other unknown specialists and non-specialists, reviewing the entire old and new class of politicians and scholars who have had a hand in today’s economy, business and institutions.

This book gives a “strange”, different and non-conformist reading of the problems gripping our society and our form of production and is also and above all a positive outcry given the vicissitudes we all have to face.                        

Contro gli specialisti. La rivincita dell’umanesimo.

Giuliano da Empoli.

Marsilio, 2013.