Preview
The Nature of Change
Coping with change is a constant condition for companies. Not only because the world around us changes incessantly and companies have to decide how to deal with new external conditions. But also because we ourselves are the ones who change and the inevitable life cycle of people is enough to change businesses internally. New people enter the company, other people leave it, and the people who remain, simply because they are ageing, also change over time. It is this incessant rhythm that determines the changes in our company: the constant turnover of new people and thus of new experiences, new ideas, ...
The Sentimental Re-education of Businesses
On April 20th, the experimental launch of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, took place. This rocket is intended to return humans to the moon and possibly to Mars. The launch was followed live by millions of people and received extensive media coverage. Just minutes after liftoff, the rocket lost control and was made to explode. In the now long history of space flights, this was not the first unsuccessful launch. So, there should be no surprise, except for that right after the explosion, the employees of SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, reacted with a long applause. The images ...
Poor but ... poor
Dino Risi's famous film “Poveri ma belli” (“Poor but beautiful”) was made in 1956. Two more would follow[1], thus composing a trilogy in which poverty is explicitly referred to in the titles, but is associated - unlike neorealist cinema - with the genre of comedy. Italy in the 1950s is a poor country that has just emerged from the devastation and material destruction of World War II. The 1953 parliamentary survey had indicated that "on average, families in a state of misery would turn out to be 1,357,000, or 11.8 percent of the total; and those in a poor condition 1,345,000, or 11.6 percent. ...
The China That Is Also a Part of Us
An argument exists that we should never write about China, because historically it is a country where the system always exists with what can change it, and by the time we describe it, it has already changed. Yet much has been written about China, and the numerous descriptions oscillate between two extremes: that based on the misunderstanding of China being far away, “mysterious,” incomprehensible, and inexplicable; and on the other hand, that of a China that is close, that we can interpret with the categories and logics familiar to us, and where “we ourselves are also Chinese in our own ...
Work Less and Earn More: a Utopia?
The world of work always occupies a central position in the economic and political debate, and that pre-eminence was also evident in the recent election campaign. As stated in Art. 1 of the Constitution, our republic is founded on labor, so it should be no surprise that this question is central in the national debate. This occurred in particular after the pandemic, in which the world of work was going through evident transformations and changes – not only in Italy: the development of remote work, the wave of layoffs that has affected different professions, and the lack of labor in some sectors. ...
Compare to Whom? A Reflection on Benchmarking
Benchmarking represents one of the most common management tools used by businesses.[1] As unfortunately happens for many tools and models of strategy, where as time passes from their introduction the awareness of their complexity declines, with the risk of using gradually simplified versions that are different from the original, the same has happened with benchmarking analysis. Introduced at the end of the 1970s by Xerox Corporation with the aim of recovering the competitiveness lost in regard to its Japanese competitors, benchmarking is based on a comparison between the company’s internal processes ...
Enemy Number One: Rhetoric
Diversity Management (DM), understood as a set of policies, practices, and actions that, in the context of human resources management, are aimed at managing the diversity of workers, began its entry and spread in Europe and Italy starting at the end of the 1990s through branches of large companies from the English-speaking world. Currently, abetted above all by the health emergency that has contributed to giving visibility to the limited attention focused on the issue of diversity, DM has spread in most industrialized countries. What is known as the "She-cession,"[1] that describes the strong ...
Americanism and Managerial Models
Managers use new management models to face the problems that arise each time changes appear – in the dimensions and complexity of businesses or in the international competitive environment – that challenge current practices. Those models contain not only a set of management techniques, but also represent the expression of a certain organizational ideology; they are cognitive maps of the social reality that influence the perception and actions of managers and justify their power and authority.[1] While it is true that managerial models are not determined only by economic and technological factors, ...
2021: An Artificial Intelligence Odyssey
When we reflect on artificial intelligence – as we are doing in the Dossier of this issue – it is useful to recall one of the most famous figures in the history of film: HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece and cult film. More than an odyssey in space, though, the film tells of a voyage in time – from primitive man to the man of the future – in which intelligence is the true protagonist, and in which HAL (an abbreviation whose letters precede the well-known brand IBM) is more than a computer in a traditional sense, but is the subject that actually controls the spaceship, ...
Sustainability at the Center of Business
It was the end of 2019 when Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who travelled the world and awoke the conscience of thousands of youth on the question of climate, was named "Person of the Year" by TIME magazine, receiving the honor of the cover and the attention of political leaders, top managers, and entrepreneurs. In the same period, the European Union approved the Green Deal, the imposing Action Plan that, through the allocation of approximately one trillion euros over the span of a decade, has the goal of transforming the climate and environmental challenge into an opportunity, guaranteeing ...