Personal events have certainly also marked Sergio Marchionne's way of approaching professional life. A fourteen-year-old boy who, uprooted from the Italian environment in which he grew up, finds himself in a country, Canada, where he knows no one outside the circle of his family and other immigrants like him.
Sergio Marchionne he does not possess the language of that place: English, an indispensable vehicle for understanding and making oneself understood, for orientation, for fitting in and being accepted, for being able to study and assert oneself. He must forget the way of thinking of an Italian to immerse himself in the way of thinking of a "American Canadian” and find his path and change it several times to “realize himself”. Here, realizing oneself was the push that first guides the boy and then will guide the manager.
If it was impossible for him, and he didn't want to do it, to forget his roots, because he was an Italian son of a family that had experienced the tragedy of Istrian foibe and twice emigrated, having become fully American he had to find a way to harmonize his double identity by becoming "himself".
As an established manager, Marchionne repeated many times in his meetings with students:
- that we need to get used to living in uncertainty;
- that we must not give up in the face of danger; that we must be ready to face the new;
- that we need to look at the unknown future as an opportunity, taking up the challenge;
- that awareness and responsibility are needed.
He did not rebel against the world around him, but tried to study it, to understand it, to improve it by finding workable solutions to complex problems who, by threatening the company entrusted to them, also threaten civil society and threaten work.
Marchionne and his 2009 speech at Palazzo Chigi
In speech at Palazzo Chigi on 20 December 2009 before the Government and the Italian trade unions he warned that it was necessary to «seek a right balance between industrial logic and social responsibility… that in moments of crisis pure economic calculation could lead to a bloodbath... and that exclusive attention to social issues would lead to the disappearance of the company".
He arrived at June 2004 in the midst of the crisis, after the Fiat group in two years he had experienced the disappearance of the lawyer Agnelli and his brother Umberto and the change of four managing directors: Cantarella, Galateri, Barberis, Morchio. First he gave it back trust people changing the way we work, looking internally for the best resources, valorising them (it is significant that only one collaborator was brought in instead of a crowd of consultants), relaunching the image of Fiat with the launch of the 500 in 2007 because, as he himself said in June 2009, «you can't imagine a Fiat without strong roots in Italy… Fiat is part of this country, it is an important piece of its history and we want it to remain an important piece of its future."
Marchionne has never used crises as a screen but as an opportunity to imagine the future
He never intended to use crises as a screen to hide behind, but was ready to exploit all the opportunities that could arise by imagining the future.
So in 2008 to deal with the crisis redesigned the structure of the s Groupseparating agricultural and industrial activities from the car and prepared a plan which, starting from the crisis in the car sector in Europe and North America, obtained the approval of the American Government which gave it: trust, responsibility and financing for save Chrysler.
In this context, always looking to the future, aware that European production overcapacity could not be saturated by European volumes, he defined the production of cars for the North American market restructuring Italian factories, making them among the most productive globally and with better working conditions than the European industry.
La then establishment of FCA it allowed him to maintain the European production structure by bending it to the potential of the North American market which in the meantime had largely overcome the crisis.
If we reread his numerous public speeches and review the promotional messages he personally curated, more attentive to emotions than to the product, we find ourselves faced with a character who was also a promoter of "business culture": an activity which unfortunately in Italy has not been understood in particular by the more ideological part or by the part more dedicated to speculative and subsidized activity compared to entrepreneurial activity.
Despite misunderstandings and fierce dissent, he had the courage to claim the “right to do business” regardless of rigid practices and constraints, regaining the freedom to negotiate outside the confederal system. He did not deny the evidence of the need for change, on the contrary, he had an enthusiastic perhaps even somewhat idealistic idea of change: that it creates a better world, that takes care of the problems caused by human activity; but he was also realistic and aware that first of all he had to strengthen the image of FCA and not weaken it in the eyes of competitors even by dissimulating with unscrupulousness as in a game of cards.
Marchionne and the need to rethink the automotive industrial system from an ecological perspective
But right there need to rethink the automotive industrial system in an ecological way and irreversible, led me to believe it was essential to proceed with balance: studying and evaluating the risks; planning the right time to complete the implementation of the economic program which involved difficult adjustments, taking into account all the factors at play; studying the way for the company finance the transformation.
Balance understood not as slowing down, postponing, stalling, but as identifying a path to follow in a defined time, step by step foreseeing every single decision in order to allow the company and its workers to achieve the transformation to reduce as much as possible the price to pay. Balance understood as redistribution, fair, progressive and without trauma, between various countries of the most painful effects and of the necessary corporate restructuring, without placing all the burdens and social consequences on a single country. Today we are once again faced with cyclopean challenges for the automotive sector with the conversion of vehicles from internal combustion to electric in an extremely short timeframe, in the presence of a world in search of a new geopolitical balance and traditional declared and undeclared wars. So one might wonder how Doctor Marchionne will face this challenge?
*This article by Paolo Rebaudengo was published in the magazine of Federmanager entitled “Imagining the Future”
