A Canadian philosopher has published a book that brings together business management methods with those of politics

Business management methods transferred to the sphere of politics and society. Mix-up of roles. A set of management techniques applied to unusual areas. This situation has now been acquired but it has not yet been as fully understood as it should. Business culture in areas that may not be appropriate ones. This is an important topic, also for “good” business culture. To understand this better, you should read “Governance. Il management totalitario” (Governance. Totalitarian management) written by Alain Deneault (a philosopher and Political Science teacher from Montreal) which has just been translated into Italian.

The book revolves around the term which gives it its title: governance. It begins with a premise: that: in the last quarter of the 20th Century, to describe and govern the running of organisations and business facilities, business theorists have resorted to using a term that, since as far back as the 16th Century, was a simple synonym for government: namely governance. In the early Eighties the term was introduced in public life on the pretext of establishing the need for sound management of State institutions and it became the “delightful name” of neoliberal State management, characterised by deregulation and privatisation of public services. But that is not enough. Because, in other words, according to the author, governance is a deliberately indefinite expression that expresses the new art of politics “without government”, in other words without that practice that presupposes a publicly debated policy.

Deneault then develops the concept of governance applied to politics through 50 chapters that each address a different aspect of the topic, starting from an assumption – “Reducing politics to a technique” -, and reaches another – “Turning nothing into a force” -, to which a conclusion is added, in the form of a question: “…But what do you propose?”. The middle of the book is an acute journey with scathing and often irreverent parts, which touch upon many aspects not only of civil life, but also of politics, governance techniques, the attitude of all of us in front of public services and our interests. And of course the relationship between companies and politics. This leads to a statement that specifies how the death of politics has given rise to the “an art of management”, that however clashes with the community.

Deneault thinks like a political philosopher and an acute observer of reality. We have already mentioned that Deneault’s reasoning is irreverent and scathing, yet in any case it is something that leaves a mark. You may not agree with it while reading it, but it is good for everyone, including entrepreneurs and managers, business culture and civil life.

Governance. Il management totalitario (Governance. Totalitarian management)

Alain Deneault
Neri Pozza, 2018

On Thursday 15 November, more than 400 people packed into the Auditorium of the Pirelli Headquarters in the Milano Bicocca district to take part in an evening entitled “Tales of Milan as an Industrial City: Words and Images from the Pirelli Foundation”, organised by the Pirelli Foundation in collaboration with the Teatro Franco Parenti and the University of Milano-Bicocca. In the hall, the public were greeted and introduced to the theme of the evening by videos of Milan of yesteryear and as it is today. In the background was a soundtrack of songs that have made the history of the city, from the famous “S.T.R.A.M.I.L.A.N.O.” composed in 1928 and made famous by the singer Milly, to Roberto Vecchioni’s timeless “Luci a San Siro” by way of songs in the Milanese dialect by Nanni Svampa and Enzo Iannacci, through to Vinicio Capossela’s recent “Pioggia di Novembre”.

The actors Marina Rocco and Rosario Lisma took to the stage with pieces from various periods and moods to illustrate the countless different faces of Milan as an industrial city: a city of streets and alleyways, of loves and traditions, of factories seen from the outside and from within, of skyscrapers and the lives of working-class folk. A city waiting to be discovered and one that, as Guido Vergani liked to say, “is not beautiful, but one of a kind”. Dino Buzzati, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Alberto Savinio, as well as Ottiero Ottieri, Giorgio Fontana and Alberto Rollo were but some of the 13 authors whose pieces – taken from novels and from the historic Pirelli magazine – inspired the reflections of Giuseppe Lupo, Piero Colaprico, and Pietro Redondi, guided by questions put to them by the director of the Pirelli Foundation, Antonio Calabrò. Pictures from the Pirelli Historical Archive accompanied the evening on the Auditorium screen: a visual journey through the urban and social development of Milan, from Arno Hammacher’s photo report on the M1 Metro construction site to shots illustrating the building of the Pirelli Tower, through to the interiors of the company’s first factory in the 1920s and recent pictures by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert of Industry 4.0.

The climax of the evening came with some readings by the two actors from the film script for Questa è la nostra città, commissioned by Pirelli from Alberto Moravia in 1947. A cross-section of working-class life showing the various generations of the Riva family describes the everyday life of industrial Milan.

The dialogue between the actors and speakers on the stage conveyed an image of a city that has changed radically in architectural, social, and economic terms but that still maintains its strong industrial – or rather “industrious, as Piero Colaprico put it – identity.

The Pirelli Foundation is taking part in Coolest Projects Milano 2018 on Saturday 17 November. The international project is promoted by the CoderDojo Foundation and gives young people an opportunity to show their inventions in the world of digital creativity.

The Pirelli Foundation and the company’s Research and Development Department will be presenting Pirelli Foundation Educational and Pirelli Cyber projects with a special talk in the inspiration area.

For more than 145 years, Pirelli has been at the forefront of scientific and technical research and it has recently launched its Cyber ​​Technologies project.

Ever since 2005, Cyber ​​Tyres have gradually revealed their enormous potential, and smart solutions designed to achieve maximum integration between tyre, car, and driver have recently been unveiled. These solutions create direct interaction between the driver and the car by means of a sensor placed inside the tyre. This provides important information on the state of the tyre itself, thus turning it into a digital product that can effectively meet the needs of future mobility. It can also detect dangerous conditions in real time while driving, thus helping prevent accidents.

Road safety and technological innovation are important issues that are also dealt with by the Pirelli Foundation through its educational activities, which are offered each year to students of various ages. Teaching programmes are carried out at the Foundation, but also at the Research and Development Department, in the chemistry and physics labs, in the Next MIRS plant, and at the Industrial Centre in Settimo Torinese, introducing young people to the world of work and to its digital transformation.

Among the various courses, “Tyre Chemistry”, “A Journey to Discover Tyres”, and “Mechanical Eyes, Digital Robots, and Music for the Factory of the Future” show young people the various stages involved in the manufacture of a tyre, from the ingredients used to make the compound through to the creation of the tread pattern, the tests to which tyres are subjected, and automated manufacturing systems.

They are taken on a journey through the documents in the company’s Historical Archive, from the first factory through to the latest technological achievements, such as the Cyber Tyre. Through over a century and a half of research and innovation and into the digital era.

The internationalism of an industrial group can also be seen in its words. Those that it uses to talk to its staff on a day-to-day basis: service information, news about company activities, and reports from other areas. Different languages, different messages, all respecting the diversity of workers in different countries. This is the rationale that has inspired Pirelli house organs for over sixty years: the decision to give each foreign subsidiary its own newsletter came in the 1950s and ’60s. This was during the Pirelli Group’s greatest expansion since the first wave of enlargement from the 1910s to the 1930s, when subsidiaries had been opened in Spain, Britain, Argentina, and Brazil. The ancestor of Pirelli house organs was the Italian Fatti e Notizie, which first came out in 1950: just a few pages with information for employees about the availability of medical assistance, summer holiday camps by the sea for their children, discounts on basic commodities, and best wishes for new Pirelli families. And at the centre of all this, the pièce de résistance, which introduced all Italian colleagues to aspects that few knew much about: the little factory for chemical products, the cooling tower that had grown up among the vulcanisers at Bicocca, raincoats made by the Azienda Arona… The early issues of Fatti e Notizie showed an Italy that needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, but that was happy to have emerged from the war. This Italian house organ still exists: it has accompanied generations of employees, following the evolution of company welfare step by step over the course of almost seven decades.

Towards the mid-1950s, Pàginas came out in Argentina and Noticias in Brazil: the “criança” – childhood – was the absolute star on the pages of these house organs: kids for whom it was right to build schools, kids who would find out “where Daddy works”, kids who in sport – soccer, of course! – would make the name Pirelli shine in the New World. Also Noticias put on a fine show, explaining to colleagues in São Paulo what the future factory in Campinas would be like, or how life was lived in the rubber plantations  in Oriboca, or again, what an effort Pirelli Brasil was putting into the restoration of the Pelourinho neighbourhood in Salvador de Bahia.

Subsidiaries opened in Greece and Turkey in 1960, both with their own house organs: Ta Nea, like the Greek national newspaper of the same name, was the paper that introduced the “new Pirelliani” in Patras to the world of their Italian, German, and Brazilian colleagues. The journal published by Pirelli in Turkey was a case apart, for it was not so much a house organ as a magazine inspired by the Italian Pirelli, which in the early 1960s was blazing a trail as a company publication also on newsstands for the general public. The Turk Pirelli publication was a glossy magazine that dealt with social issues, tourist reports, and glittering stories of singers and film stars. Italian ones in particular. At least one article a month was devoted to the father of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The German Aktuell specialised in innovative ideas and technologies, and the covers showed meticulous graphic designs to recall the tread patterns of tyres. The English World, which also had the assistance of Derek Forsyth, the wizard of publishing design, was more open to social issues – the company pub, the new headquarters, the company Christmas party, and so on.

And then came the globalisation of the early 1990s. Now the vision stretched out to encompass all Pirelli’s markets around the world. In-house communication spoke as one and was shared by all. With Pirelli World, the periodical launched in 1993, the concept of the house organ became global and transnational, reflecting a unified, consistent production system. A single Pirelli for a complex world.

A book about to be published recounts the role and power of people within production organisations

Not resources as such, but men and women in flesh and bones. Thinking minds. The fulcrums of the business. But also beings who deserve respect and dignity. Not simple resources, precisely. It is the new interpretative and management profile which in recent times has come to the surface in businesses. In other words, people are increasingly understanding how important it is to have qualified, competent and motivated people within their organisation, so people, precisely, not human resources. The cultural – rather than managerial – passage from the concept of “resource” to that of a “person” is anything but self-evident.

The book by Andrea di Lenna which is about to be published – “Risorsa a chi? Valorizzare le persone per migliorare le performance aziendali” (Who’s a resource? Empowering individuals to improve business performance) – can help us to understand the meaning of what is happening. To be honest, this had already been advocated decades ago: In fact “Organisations are the communities of human beings, not just containers of human resources”, stated Henry Mintzberg, as he began to outline the need for a new deal in the management of those who work within companies every day, whatever they are in terms of type, size and area of business.
Men and women, therefore. With all their peculiarities as individuals and groups. Di Lenna, starting with an analysis of reference cultures for companies and with the exploration of the characteristics of vision, mission and values of the organisations themselves, manages to provide answers to some fundamental questions. For example, how should people be recruited in businesses that want to maintain their competitiveness? And what kind of training you should consider to develop people in an adequate manner? And also, how do you manage the motivation of people within organisational contexts? And what are the characteristics of the most efficient workplaces, both from the physical point of view and from the organisational one?

What Di Lenna explains is not only a theoretical approach, but it also contains numerous practical cases and concrete situations of daily business life.
From all this emerges an element that has always been present in companies but which has often, and for a long time, been culpably forgotten: the strong presence of people within production organisations. Not resources, precisely, but the true wealth of every productive context.

Risorsa a chi? Valorizzare le persone per migliorare le performance aziendali (Who’s a resource? Empowering individuals to improve business performance)
Andrea di Lenna
Egea, 2018

“Industrial culture is a bridge between the economy and social development at the centre of the European identity”. This is the demanding central theme for the XVIIth Week of Business Culture 2018, organised by the Confindustria association and Museimpresa, scheduled from the 9th to the 23rd November (and thus a week so heavily charged with commitments, around the whole of Italy, that it requires an extension of the official timespan). In Milan it coincides with BookCity, more than 1,300 events spread around libraries, theatres, schools, universities, bookshops, squares, clubs, hospitals, prisons, public halls and private venues, to talk about books: novels, poetry, history, politics, economics and so many other subjects. Knowledge and pleasure. Audience events and meetings. In a city of books which is open and welcoming.

At Pirelli we are going on stage with a “Story about the industrial city of Milan”: literature, conversations, words and images about the factories and neighbourhoods of Milan, spread between memories and the current day. The event is in the Auditorium of the Pirelli Headquarters in Bicocca, on Thursday 15th, at 7 pm, thanks to the initiative of the Pirelli Foundation and the Franco Parenti Theatre, in collaboration with the Bicocca University, specifically in the context of the programmes of meetings between BookCity and the Week of Business Culture. The evening will be enriched with a little trinket from the past: a reading of several extracts from a neorealistic melodrama by Alberto Moravia, commissioned in 1947 by Alberto Pirelli and intended for a production by Roberto Rossellini, but never performed. Those words by one of the best Italian writers will now be brought back to life through the voices of two excellent actors, Marina Rocco and Rosario Lisma.

Rediscovered in the drawers of the Pirelli Historic Archive, Moravia’s text is entitled “This is our city” and describes the everyday life of industrial Milan in the following terms: “Here is the Pirelli factory. Arriving from every direction, the workers gather in the yard overlooking the gatehouse, between the fruit carts and stalls of the cigarette sellers. A weak autumnal sunshine dapples the yard and the walls of the Pirelli building. The workers enter one behind the other, go and put their bicycles in the storage area, under the canopy, and then from there make their way each to their own departments”.People who become personalities. Individuals. And a harmonious unit. Factories used to be social forums, places of encounters and conflicts, cooperation and discussion. Over time, they also became living and crucial centres in which to discover and enjoy, through participation, the dimensions of citizenship linked to work, with all its interconnections between rights and obligations, identity and responsibility. A factory, as an opportunity for social inclusion. The best literature, and in the same way the cinema, the theatre, and photography, have borne witness to this.

As well as Moravia, Marina Rocco and Rosario Lisma will be reading extracts from novels about Milan and texts featured in the Pirelli Magazine. Major signatories: from Dino Buzzati to Alda Merini, from Carlo Emilio Gadda to Giorgio Scerbanenco, from Primo Levi to Ottiero Ottieri. Ending with modern works by Giorgio Fontana, Alberto Rollo and yet other writers.Alternating with these readings will be dialogues with the writers Piero Colaprico and Giuseppe Lupo, and with Pietro Redondi, a professor at the Bicocca University of Milan. Memories. And current events.

So many different features but which retains, as strong as ever, the traces of its identity as an industrial city and keeps them alive through the course of radical economic and social transformations. There are no longer any of those traditional factories, but neo-factories are growing in their place, where the processes of the digital economy are combining together, in a novel way, manufacturing and services, research and virtuous relationships with universities. A topical blend of competitiveness and growth which has its roots in the traditional Milanese attitude of “doing things, and doing them well”. And which initiatives such as the “Story about the industrial city of Milan” help to keep centre-stage in the minds of the public. A cultural choice which has solid economic relevance.

Indeed, industry is an important driver for the Italian economy (we are still the second largest manufacturing country in Europe, after Germany, thanks to our companies in the sectors of mechatronics, mechanics, robotics, rubber, automotive, plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, as well as the traditional “Made in Italy” sectors of furnishings, clothing and food and agriculture). “Beautiful factories” very often, well-designed, transparent, welcoming, secure. And factories which are sustainable, both environmentally and socially, at  the forefront of the green economy in Europe. It is well worthwhile reiterating this to a public opinion which is often unaware, distracted. And to reaffirm it during these difficult times in which anti-business and anti-science attitudes, including within government circles, are being given too much room. Industry means growth, economic development, inclusion, solidarity. It possesses characteristics which bring into play competition and community spirit, wealth and work, technological innovation and social change. It deserves shared memories. And that its story continues.