A book full of suggestions offers a different method to better manage a company

A philosophical theory on how to better, or best, govern a company. An important topic – essential, actually, considering our digital world – that Emanuele Sacerdote tackles in his latest literary effort. Indeed, Filosofia per l’impresa (Corporate philosophy) is based on a seemingly simple, though actually rather complex, concept: the philosophical thoughts of illustrious wise thinkers – such as Socrates, Aristoteles, Bacon, Descartes, Hegel, Schopnhauer, Husserls, Popper – could enrich and strengthen the strategic governance of enterprises by enhancing the governability and boosting the potential for progress in production organisations.

Sacerdote begins by observing that corporate management entails a “dominant” concept set on strengthening its own strategies by increasing awareness, foresight, realism stance and conciseness to promote better results. This all sounds fine, but it is not sufficient, as according to Sacerdote we also need a “propositional” concept advocating the need for a new “pre-strategic cycle” whose methodological quintessence consists in a path based on deductive reasoning, a critical approach and factual analysis.

In order to illustrate all this, the author leads readers along a similarly simple and linear path that focuses upon the need to enhance a company’s governability, a focus on philosophy as a pre-strategic tool, advice on how to “implement” the proposed method and a number of practical applications that can be used as examples.

Reading Sacerdote means venturing into a very different world than that of mere (and boring) classic corporate strategy – a more complex and interesting world that is certainly worth discovering and exploring.

Filosofia per l’impresa (Corporate philosophy)

Emanuele Sacerdote

Il Sole 24 Ore, 2023

The evening of the Awards Ceremony for the winners of the 2023 Premio Campiello is fast approaching. Once again, it is supported by Pirelli, which is steadfast in its commitment to promoting reading. The final, which will be held on Saturday 16 September, at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, will be presented by Francesca Fialdini and Lodo Guenzi, and broadcast live on Rai 5 television.

As in recent years, the Pirelli Foundation has invited the five finalist writers to record video interviews in which they talk about their books. Avid readers will thus be able to learn more about the protagonists of this sixty-first edition of the prestigious literary award, while eagerly waiting for the name of the winner to be revealed.

The five finalists will tell us about their works with one interview a day for a week, from today until Friday 15 September. We will hear about the biography of Joyce Lussu, one of the most revolutionary and fascinating personalities of the Resistance and of twentieth-century Italy; a novel in which the protagonist confronts her own desires and seeks spaces in which to express them; an essay that reconstructs the role of women during the resistance to Nazi-Fascism; a book that combines prose and poetry, in which strange travellers traverse the Mediterranean in search of an ancient, untamed deity; and a diary chronicling a summer meandering around Rome, remembering the life of Ennio Flaiano.

The complete programme of videos that will be available on the fondazionepirelli.org website is as follows:

Monday 11 September 2023: Silvia Ballestra – La Sibilla (Laterza)

Tuesday 12 September 2023: Marta Cai – Centomilioni (Einaudi)

Wednesday 13 September 2023: Tommaso Pincio – Diario di un’estate marziana (Perrone)

Thursday 14 September 2023: Benedetta Tobagi – La resistenza delle donne (Einaudi)

Friday 15 September 2023: Filippo Tuena – In cerca di Pan (Nottetempo)

Enjoy the show – and the read!

The Pirelli Foundation

In 1956 Pirelli left Formula One and devoted all its resources and energy to the study and production of the Cinturato tyre. The following year, Stirling Moss won the Italian Grand Prix on the last Stelvio Corsa tyres that remained in stock. When Pirelli returned to the Championship in the 1980s, first the Cinturato and then the P Zero took Formula 1 by storm. The era of the Stelvio and of the Stella Bianca appeared to have come to an end. Or maybe not… In 2018, the Milano-San Remo was dominated by the stars, Pirelli and Ferrari. Spurred into action by the Prancing Horse, Pirelli brought the legendary Stelvio Corsa back to the market in its “Collezione” line exclusively for the Ferrari 250 GTO, which was developed to compete in the Gran Turismo category. Two sizes were made available: the 215/70 R15 98W for the front and the 225/70 R15 100W for the rear. No other size was planned, and no other car can fit this Stelvio Corsa. In other words, it was “the” tyre created solely for the Ferrari 250 GTO.

This new blend of tradition and modernity started out from technical drawings that were provided by the Pirelli Foundation from its Historical Archive, and it received its trial by fire in the Ligurian race. Aesthetically identical to the “Record-Breaker” tyre but now with the most advanced systems used in motorsport, the Stelvio Corsa of the new millennium pays the closest attention to the environment as well as to safety, while losing none of its original flair. Yesterday, like today, the result is a blend of excellence in terms of performance and authenticity and it is one that strengthens the bond between Ferrari and Pirelli, on both track and road.

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It was in 1981 that Pirelli made its return to Formula One, with Toleman, after twenty-five years away. It had spent those years researching radials and testing them on dirt tracks in rally races. The Long P now equipped Alfa Romeo, BMW, Citroën, Fiat, Ford, Mitsubishi, Opel, Peugeot, Subaru and Toyota. But it was with Lancia that the turning point had come just a few years previously, when the Stratos took to the track in the World Rally Championship in 1974. The car was so powerful that Pirelli had to create a new project, the P7, the precursor to the quintessential high-performance tyre – the P Zero, a symbol of absolute perfection. This was to be the tyre that, more than any other, would affect every area of motorsport, from Formula One to rallying, to GT and the famous road races, as well as the endurance contests with the Ferrari F40 LM at Le Mans. Experimentally introduced in 1984, the P Zero hit the roads in late 1985, and in early 1986 it was fitted on another Lancia, the Delta S4 racing version, which immediately made its mark with a long sequence of successes and victories. This came in 1986, and Ferrari and Pirelli once again started making history together.

At Maranello the following year, the Prancing Horse officially unveiled the F40, which to all intents and purposes was a road car but its true vocation was clearly sporty. With a top speed of 320 km/h it needed tyres that could offer comfort, superb performance, efficiency and grip on dry and wet, on both straights and corners. In other words, it needed the P Zero. As it had already done with the Stelvio, the Long P specially created two sizes (245/40 ZR 17 for the front and 335/35 ZR 17 for the rea) for the Scuderia. Not long after this, all car manufacturers started requesting custom-made tyres. The P Zero family took shape as the result of the constant evolution of tyres of sports cars adapted to different needs. In 1988 Lamborghini became part of the “P Zero racing stable” when it chose the ultra-high performance tyre for its Countach Anniversary, which celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of the Raging Bull company, making it the star in a short television communication masterpiece, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Its use off road, however, is but a small part, however prestigious, of what the P Zero can do.

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The year is 1953. A Ferrari 500 with Pirelli tyres flashes by at 200 km/h on the Monza track. Alberto Ascari is at the wheel, preparing to conquer an overwhelming double victory. Hurtling round beneath him, however, are not the “Victory Tyres”, but a new model that the Long P has developed exclusively for the new car designed by Ferrari solely for racing and launched on this Formula One Championship season. The tyres are known as Stelvio Corsa.

Motorcar racing in the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by the Stella Bianca Corsa, which became the number one choice for the top car manufacturers Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, and Maserati. However, these were also the post-war years – the years of the Reconstruction, of Pirelli beginning to focus on mass mobility and celebrating the various Alpine passes with a new range of products. These were the Rolle, Sempione and, as we have seen, the Stelvio. The last of these immediately earned the moniker as the “Record-Breaker”, taking Ascari to victory in the 1952 Italian Grand Prix and winning the Formula One title that year, both for himself and for Ferrari. A success that was repeated the following year, in 1953, and that led to a whole slew of victories and new products that were more powerful and with even greater performance. In terms of successes on the racetrack, however, the new tyres were never able to outclass the Stelvio, which also took Maurice Trintignant and Froilàn Gonzales to victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

What made the difference, both on and off the track, was technology. In the road model, the tread, which consisted of pentagonal blocks linked together lengthwise, marked the shift from a sculpted to a striped design. With improved road holding and low noise, it used not just natural rubber but also various types of synthetic rubber and rayon plus nylon in the carcass. The racing version, on the other hand, kept the tread in natural rubber and adopted a design with transversal cuts for wet conditions and a different percentage of carbon black in the compounds to help improve resistance and prevent deformation. Races, of course, but also advanced technologies and industrial developments that were taken from racing circuits to everyday cars, in the most authentic Pirelli tradition of combining research for racing with applications for the market. The Topolino was fitted with the Stella Bianca and the Fiat 600 with the Rolle, while the Mini and the Fiat 500 took the Cinturato CN54, which was derived directly from the experience in rallying.

The Stella Bianca, Rolle, Sempione, Stelvio, and Cinturato immediately made the history of both Italian mobility and of motorcar racing, and all shared a passion for challenges both on and off the circuits.

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A sense of passion is something that can be found in all of Pirelli’s communication campaigns under the direction of Leonardo Sinisgalli. At a historic time, when motorisation was growing exponentially, the company placed its bets not only on manufacturing increasingly advanced tyres but also on promoting them by bringing in artists and intellectuals who could create a new communication strategy for newsprint, posters, cinema, and direct advertising. The so-called Direzione Propaganda worked across the board to tell the story of the latest models of tyres launched on the market for all manner of vehicles, seasons and driving conditions. To achieve this, Ezio Bonini and Pavel Michael Engelmann’s graphic works were joined by those of Franco Grignani and many other talented artists.

In 1951, Bonini’s Quanti calcoli fa la natura (“How many calculations nature does”) series starts from ideas put forwards by Leonardo Sinisgalli and uses pictures of molluscs, stars and crystals as metaphors for the engineering work (molecules, geometric sequences, genetic sediments) needed to produce a shell, a crustacean or… a Stelvio. The perfect shapes created by nature around us are as amazing as the admiration we feel when we see the way tread patterns are created not by the hand of nature, but by the skills and precision of men and machines. Different visions and forms of creativity enriched Pirelli’s visual communication and helped create the company’s unmistakable style over the decades. In 1952, Pagot Film celebrated the Stelvio in an award-winning animated short in colour entitled Novità al Salone Internazionale dell’Auto di Torino [“News from the Turin Car Show”] directed by Nino and Toni Pagot. In 1956, Franco Grignani created a campaign devoted to travelling. Highly evocative in terms of its landscapes, it offered a new, original take on the technique of collage, highlighting the three key qualities of the Stelvio: flexibility, durability and road holding.

But a more “classic” approach still persisted, as we see in the Sicurezza nella velocità [“Safety at speed!”] campaign by Pavel Engelmann, which followed the evolution of racing tyres from the Stella Bianca to the Stelvio between 1952 and 1954. Here, the dominant colour was the same shade of red that the Futurist Roowy had used forty years previously. Pirelli’s communication also received major awards from a number of international juries – including the Palme d’Or for Advertising, which it won in 1953, and other important honours for its graphic art. What really mattered for the company, however, was the customers’ approval. And this was ensured by Armando Testa and the Artiglia l’asfalto [Claws the Asphalt] poster. The idea of turning the tyre into the mane of a lion, immediately brought to mind the key characteristics of the product: power, grip, and elegance. All in a single minimalist image.

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In 1932 Pirelli launched Supersport – an entire range of racing tyres. The forerunner? None other than the Stella Bianca, distinguished by a small white star (“stella bianca”) added to the tread pattern of the road model. The symbol was placed on the side of the tyre known as the Stella Bianca Corsa. This was the model that Giuseppe Farina mounted on his Alfa Romeo at Silverstone in 1950, when the first Formula One World Championship was held. An undisputed star until the 1950s, the Stella Bianca scored many important victories with Ferrari and Maserati, dominating world motor racing championships. The Quadrifoglio coupled with the likes of Enzo Ferrari and Tazio Nuvolari became an unbeatable mix. With the car wearing Stella Bianca tyres, of course. Tyres change and the design of the cars has been subject to constant innovation but Alfa Romeo and Pirelli have always been together out on the circuits, right from the outset. In the 1960s, the Stella Bianca – the “Victory Tyre” – left the field open to the Stelvio, which immediately earned itself its nickname as the “Record-Breaker”. But first, the five-pointed white star need one final victory – and it came at the Italian Grand Prix on the Monza circuit with Alberto Ascari in his Ferrari 500.

We might be inclined to think that the life of this tyre, like so many others before and after it, had come to an end. But that was not to be. At the prompting of Ferrari, the Stella Bianca made its return to the racing circuits in 2018. A new model, with the same look as the original – but the look concealed the most advanced technologies developed by the Long P’s Research and Development team. After years of radials, Pirelli Collezione brought the traditional cross-ply structure back to the market, recalling the close bond between tyres made for roads and those designed for racing circuits around the world. The Stella Bianca sure has had a remarkable journey – from track to road, and now back to track. A story with many pages yet to be written.

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Still today, the P Zero is a legend, associated with power, design and speed. It ultimately derived from the P7, the brainchild of the engineer Mario Mezzanotte, which also made its mark in racing. The road version of the P Zero came onto the market in 1987, a year after the launch of the Ferrari F40, with a structure that is actually highly complex but that is designed to ensure top performance at all times. In 1994 the P Zero family underwent another major evolution with the introduction of the P Zero System, which immediately became part of an international version of the Power is nothing without control advertising campaign created by Young & Rubicam with the athlete Carl Lewis as the endorser. Here the front and rear tread pattern are directly derived from the world of racing.

They were specially designed to counter aquaplaning and were first used exclusively on supercars for road use and later on very high performance cars on the track. In practice, the P Zero could now be used as much on a Ferrari as on a Volkswagen Golf or a BMW. And this led to the What you drive is your business, what you drive on is ours (1995) campaign and to Pirelli. Sizin için, sizinle (Pirelli: With you, for you, 1989), P Zero the Hero (1996-7) and To build a winning car you need to start from Zero (2001). But the story of P Zero Collection does not end here. In 2003 came the P Zero Corsa System, which was specially created for the road-going Ferrari Challenge, drawing on the experience of the Ferrari 360 GT in Gran Turismo.

It was the young model Naomi Campbell, at the height of her career, who the following year unveiled Planet Zero, a range that includes the P Zero System, P Zero Rosso, P Zero Nero, P Zero Corsa and – for large SUVs – the Scorpion Zero. In July 2023, the family acquired a new member: the P Zero E, a distillation of technology and sustainability that draws on the most recent technological innovations created for sustainable electric mobility. It has already achieved results never previously obtained in the UHP tyre market. Then there is the P Zero R, designed for ultra high performance supercars, and the top-of-the-range P Zero Trofeo RS, for track use by hypercars. The P Zero has never stopped evolving, making it always the most advanced on the market and, still today, it is the company’s poster product in terms of top performance, dynamic qualities and versatility.

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The 1930s were the golden years of motor sport. And, indeed, Pirelli’s focus on the world of racing and speed reached the very highest levels during this period. Race after race, the development of tyre technology really took off. Leading the way was the innovation brought about by the Cord, a rubberised fabric that eliminated the problem of friction between the cords in traditional fabrics, ensuring greater resistance and durability. The Cord, which was further perfected in the low-pressure Superflex version, earned Pirelli numerous victories together with Fiat and Alfa Romeo. This can be seen in the fame of the Superflex Cord, with which the Quadrifoglio won its first title in 1924 upon its entry into the world of the Grand Prix. This created a perfect triangulation with Pirelli and with the racing champions of the time: Antonio Ascari, Gastone Brilli-Peri, and Giuseppe Campari.

Europe was emerging from the First World War and the economic recovery of the Roaring Twenties meant that technological research was entering a new era. Cars were still a rare sight on European roads. They were mostly luxury or sports cars, which are still today among the most sought after by collectors. Jewels of Italian industry that deserve tyres worthy of their performance and prestige. This was the dawn of the Stella Bianca, the first cross-ply tyre. It was so innovative that it became part of the evolution of mass mobility from the 1920s to the 1950s, and it wrested the title as the “Victory Tyre” from the Superflex Cord.

The Stella Bianca introduced a more complex tread pattern than those of previous models, giving it greater grip at high speeds, especially on slippery or wet roads. This meant it was perfect for compact cars, but also for sports cars and vans.

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After the great successes in rally racing, especially at Montecarlo, the focus shifted to the Formula One circuits. This was partly due to the amazing results achieved by Lotus and Toleman in free practice on the San Marino circuit in 1984. When Pirelli returned to racing, one of the technicians of the English team was said to be “a very good test driver who, despite his very young age is able to provide a lot of information about how the car and the tyres behave”. His name was Ayrton Senna. In 1985 Toleman was taken over by Benetton and, the following year, Pirelli returned to the circuits for three years (1986-9), equipping Brabham, Dallara, Minardi and Zakspeed. Pirelli’s strategy was to work with smaller teams, which could act as testers, experimenting with new ideas and technologies and studying the relationship between man and machine in view of a greater commitment that started in 1991. This was the year when Pirelli approached Benetton, for which Michael Schumacher was second driver. The top-of-the-range ultra-low-profile tyre was now mounted on the cars of each individual team until, in 2011, Pirelli became the sole supplier for the Championship.

This was the greatest stage the P Zero had ever been on. Now, thanks to their success, Pirelli tyres have become synonymous with Formula 1. And, of course, there is that little stylistic detail: the name P Zero in bright colours on the side wall of the tyre, which makes the range instantly recognisable. Just a few years later, this was to acquire a very special meaning on the tracks. In 2022, Pirelli offered Formula One drivers a total of six different compounds – two for each of the three P Zero slick tyres for dry tracks and for high temperatures (Red, Yellow and White). Over time, racing fans have learnt that each colour corresponds to a compound and thus to a strategic decision declared by each racing team based on the particular circuit and on the driver’s style and the environmental conditions.

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