Management Returns to the Centre of Communities

The forthcoming Sima’s (the Italian Society of Management Scholars) Festival of Management is approaching. It is still growing and evolving thanks to positive feedback received after the first edition.

We are coming back to Milan and to Bocconi University on 7^th and 8^th of March 2024, thanks to precious support of our colleagues and to the great effort of the Sima’s Past President, Sandro Castaldo, who believed in this project from the very first moment.

We have been working for a long time to the several financial and organizational elements as well as to the “editorial” and communication plan. We are working hard to create an event for serving and representing at its best the wide community of management experts, promoting the undeniable capability of managerial and business knowledge to create shared value and wellbeing for the society and for our country.

The Festival of Management aims at establishing and consolidating its active role in promoting the enhancement of the technical culture and the knowledge essential for a good development of companies, labor market, and local areas. This is possible thanks to concrete actions, examples, and stories which points out the quality and the ability to “serve” of management women and man.

Language and communication style will be deliberately informative, pointing to intrigue and fascinate a wide audience, who will enjoy for free a good mix of scholars, world-leading opinion leaders, journalists, visionary entrepreneurs, enlightened politicians, international stars of entrepreneurial and management world.

The Festival of Management also aims at giving a tangible form and substance to intriguing debates and stories, linking them to images, emotional videos, hand-on demos, prototypes, products, and services to be discussed and advanced during specific moments of the Festival. These moments are creatively designed and managed together with the more proactive and interested stakeholders. This will be done grasping the opportunity of “Phygital” experiences, well-established during the pandemic period, which boost the national and international connectivity and inclusiveness, supporting the hybrid sharing of valuable managerial experiences. In doing so, the Festival of Management can concretely support public opinion and policy makers, especially who are responsible for national and local economic policies, to better understand the effect of managerial action. It will be also underlined that the cross-cutting and transversal nature of business knowledge and skills can make services essential not only for companies, but also for institutions, communities, and local areas development. In this vein, the Festival program is based on current issues of public interest, which are open to the cross-cutting nature of management as well as to “demonstrate” and narrate examples, and action-stories able to shed new lights on the importance of management.

In the enhancement of managerial culture, the so-called “champions” of management - visionary individuals (institutional representative, entrepreneurs, policy makers, public managers, and opinion leaders) - play a leading role. This will also contribute to nourish a lively debate pointing to give a concrete contribution to the further development of managerial knowledge and action, inspiring the future, establishing synergies and creative links as well as inspiring collective approaches to innovation, strategic change, life quality and wellbeing enhancement.  

In this sense, management people should consider a real civic duty supporting and serving communities and local areas, offering their competences as well as technical and methodological skills to develop, execute, and manage concrete and useful project proposals. In doing so the contribution of Italian and international Management scholars is essential because this is essential for a strategic positioning and for a technical and reputational accreditation. In a nutshell, management scholars have the responsibility to qualify and boost the uniqueness and inimitability of this project, which is and will be always different from other initiatives.

Roberto Vona is the creator and SIMA Delegate for Festival of Management Scientific Coordination