#Diogenedixit
Goodbye Workers?
This Dossier is dedicated to work, and more specifically to workers in businesses and organizations in a broad sense. "Workers" is an almost outdated term that, similar to what happened with "laborers," is now disappearing from the managerial vocabulary. In its place people speak of "human resources" and "human capital," and no longer of "employees" but "associates." Yet we are not faced with a simple linguistic change, but rather an epistemological break that reflects a profound transformation that has occurred in businesses and in the processes that govern the selection and access of workers ...
HIT Radar: Application Focus – Industrial Operations
Industrial IoT Platform Industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms act as control hubs for all the industrial automation solutions – from manufacturing to predictive analytics - empowered by the Internet of Things. While these are still early days for the Internet of Thigs, technology providers are investing billions building new-consolidated platforms. You should be prepared to exploit this new application paradigm by studying the market, building-in security and, eventually, developing your first POCs and partnerships. It may take years to develop and scale a platform, but now is the time to make investment ...
Palazzo Te and the Promotion of the Local Territory
Palazzo Te is one of the most important European Renaissance palaces, designed and built by Giulio Romano, first a student of Raphael in Rome, and then invited to Mantua by Federico Gonzaga on the suggestion of Baldassar Castiglione. The commission was sumptuous, and the resulting design is extraordinary. A painter from the Cadore area who was a friend of Giulio Romano, Tiziano Vecellio, would paint the potraits of the three protagonists of the story (one is in Palazzo Te, one at the Prado, and one at the Louvre), almost to immortalize the outcome. The palace grew thanks to the tireless work of ...
Messages from Hong Kong
It has been called the last battle of Hong Kong. Two million demonstrators out of a total of seven million inhabitants, practically one out of three, took to the streets to oppose the approval of a law that would permit extradition to China for crimes punished with a minimum of seven years in prison. They won: the discussion in the legislature was postponed to some future date. But the war to maintain “HongKongitude” didn’t just start, and won’t end anytime soon. In reality, the last word is scheduled for 2047, when the former British colony will definitively lose all of the autonomy it ...
Cultural Institutions as Enterprises
“What can the world of industry do for culture?”. This was the question posed in a round table discussion organized by the Turin Industrial Association, an occasion for interaction between local enterprises and the world of culture, in which I recently took part. A first answer seems to be the following: culture is important, it should be protected and supported; business is enlightened and dedicates attention and funding to culture, obtaining visibility and consideration in exchange. It’s encouraging that the industrial world is seeking ways to support culture. Yet I wonder why it is so ...
HIT Radar: Application Focus - Finance
Cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency is a digital token whose creation is regulated by the blockchain technology, which also ensures the legitimacy of transactions conducted using that digital asset. Despite the humongous hype around cryptocurrencies, the real value of this technology is still unclear – due to the lack of mainstream services and real business cases. Cryptocurrencies are the first technology able to create valuable scarcity in the digital world; therefore, they have the potential to make a significant impact at an enterprise level. A CxO must be prepared to enhance this application ...
Public Goods Need Europe
There are at least three wrong ideas that need to be cleared up to begin a constructive debate on the role of the European Union at this point in history. The first is that the important decisions in the EU are made in Brussels without any involvement of the Member States. The second is that the decisions made in Brussels have no democratic basis since they are made by bureaucrats not elected by the people. And the third is that there are no truly “European” decisions that Member States should make together with Brussels. The fundamental purpose of the European Union is to allow the governments ...
Cryptocurrencies: The Role of the Bank of Italy and the Consob
In recent times, our monetary and financial authorities have finally decided to intervene in the dark world of cryptocurrencies and especially of cryptoactivities. Given the confusion and lack of knowledge on the subject, we should first state that the former are virtual currencies, the most widespread of which is Bitcoin, issued without any underlying value, not minted or produced physically, but traded electronically. Cryptoactivities, on the other hand, are generally linked to the funding of enterprises and projects, do not have any monetary function, and are expressed in cryptocurrencies, ...
Illegal Capital Flows, Europe's Holes
The case of Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark, was the sixth time in just a few months that a bank belonging to a Member State of the European Union was implicated in the laundering of dirty money: Estonia, Germany, Holland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Malta, strictly in alphabetical order. And that’s not all: in January, the European Commission issued its first recommendation on the so-called “gold visas,” the practice by which certain EU countries such as Malta, Cyprus, and Bulgaria grant citizenship to non-EU citizens in exchange for financial investments. These “gold visas” can ...
What’s in the New Silk Road
Italy was the first G7 country to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with China. The framework is that of the so-called New Silk Road, the colossal investment plan launched in 2013 by the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, with the idea of exploiting the trade routes of antiquity to move goods from one side of the Eurasian continent to the other, by sea and by land. In essence, the goal is to cultivate and strengthen the economic links between China and the participating nations through a new network of infrastructure that will potentially favor the creation of an important ...