The forced stop by Covid 19 was a fundamental step for all companies who, if strengthened by a long-term strategic vision and far-sighted investments in human capital, have had one more chance to emerge victorious and strengthened.
Future Age, like all companies that deal with strategic and organizational improvement of companies, aims to make customers' tomorrows safer, with governance of competitive and non-competitive threats, helping them to preserve business continuity. In the course of their activities every business is subject to a variety of threats that affect operations and therefore the ability to generate value, as unfortunately we have also been able to find in recent months due to the Coronavirus emergency.
In addition to being alongside our customers in these difficult months, helping them to identify and manage the opportunities that are generated by a correct and proactive risk management activity, this period has given us the opportunity to reflect within our structure For improve the integration between people, processes and technology.
Attention has been focused precisely on people: how to further develop their technical skills and their way of working in a team? How to identify leaders capable of aligning people in pursuing common goals, pushing them to ever higher levels of performance? New objectives were born and what has become our new mission: grow Italian companies through sustainable managerial development that enhances the talent and distinctive skills of individuals.
In addition to working on the mission, we also got to reorganize the structure by bringing out three new business units: ERM enterprise risk management (integrated risk management process that supports management and the board of directors in making decisions compatible with the company's risk profile and consistent with corporate objectives), Future Age production system (managerial development program) and the information technology program which consists in accelerating the strategic and organizational transformation of companies by integrating the human factor with digital technologies.
However, the sphere on which we worked with the greatest determination was that of corporate culture, starting from the Japanese concept of HANSEI which literally means self-reflection and refers to the fact of understanding the reasons for mistakes made in the past in order to draw lessons for the future. Each member has developed an institutional report of conscious reflection to be presented to the team and we have also created a knowledge database, a centralized system that collects and makes the knowledge stratified in the company on processes and services available to all.
We also focused on the strengthening our team: if the common goal is to make the customer's experience unique, the same also applies to the experience of employees and collaborators.
The rapid evolution of information technology, globalization, the search for greater flexibility, the presence of millennials within companies have resulted in a great heterogeneity in organizational contexts.
The natural consequence is the need to manage the diversity that people bring and make it a strength.
It is from these assumptions that our reflection started, which also led to the inclusion of three new function managers in our team: an Italian sales manager, a foreign sales manager and an IT project manager.
The strong signal we wanted to give is that even in times of crisis we must always start again from the most important resource we have: human capital.
That's why we carry on a "horizontal pyramid" business organization, inspired by the principle that within a company there shouldn't be a boss who issues orders and controls but a leader who organizes and manages the work of talented human resources. Investing in human resources also means investing in training, an opportunity we seized during the lockdown, stimulating the growth of each team member from professional issues such as finance and compliance to more personal areas, such as food education aimed at improving well-being psychophysical and health.
Finally, we sought an answer to the most immediate question. What do companies that have not been destabilized by Covid 19 have in common? According to our experience, long-term strategies and the related competitive advantages that can be acquired over time always come before short-term gains. The value of a company can grow considerably over time by having a clear strategic vision that drives day-to-day activities. If this strategic vision exists, three months of forced outage should not have destabilized companies but rather provided theopportunity to develop innovation of products and services, internal processes and people.
