Adriano Olivetti passed away in 1960, but his myth of enlightened entrepreneur survives so much that he has been, and continues to be, the protagonist of various fictions and countless books and essays. However, none of these remembers how the innovative seeds he introduced into the company survived, picked up by management and new investors, who used them to achieve enormous international success in the Information Technology market of the 80s and '90s. XNUMX. The two authors of this book, Mario Citelli and Elserino Piol, who lived this experience as protagonists, tell this story of Italian excellence and entrepreneurial continuity with lucidity, passion and objectivity.
A testimony of immense value and of great relevance. Made in view of the second millennium, Olivetti's Adaptive Business Model experiences can represent an excellent basis for new business initiatives and an incentive to change our economic and social ecosystem.
There are books that force you to deeply rethink your opinions and to revise your myths just as deeply and therefore to take into account that our spiritual life is life of, between and through symbols and that our personality is built between these myths and symbols. The Olivetti archetype, the Olivetti of Hadrian and after Hadrian, is precisely one of these archetypes and to use the linguistic construct of Bernhard, who was Olivetti's psychoanalyst, going through that myth, those myths, those symbols, means building and reconstruct the phylogeny and ontogeny of one's own personality.
This book by Mario Citelli and Elserino Piol - who are also two myths - therefore forces us to this Jungian exercise that makes fun of all the theories of mirror neurons. I found myself naked rediscovering that I was wrong and that I had lived with at least two or three myths that had helped me bear the discomfort of civilization over the past thirty years. But let's go in order.
This book is a perfect historiographical exercise for managerial use that is exercised on three strands of thought. The history of the industrial chain and of precision mechanics (the typewriter) and then of electronics and distributed information technology and then again of telecommunications. The second strand is that of Olivetti's history and is therefore the story of a company which, like a salamander, is able to pass hunchbackedly through the fire of three industries, until the last of these, telecommunications, sees none the stake. The third strand is that of the dialectic between ownership and management, in a managerial capitalism that already begins with Adriano and ends with the same end as Olivetti: this time the stake is the alchemical financialization of the real economy.
What struck me, of course, being a son of the history of the transition from precision mechanics to information technology to telecommunications, was seeing many of my firm ideas turned upside down. In a nutshell: Carlo De Benedetti comes out less worse than I had thought, even if I will never forgive him for having pulped the library of the Olivetti industry in Ivrea, so that Ettore's body would no longer remain, and therefore inflicting more terrible pain, knowing how much books were dear to that great man Adriano. After all, he also wrote it in a famous article that appeared in "Il Sole 24 ore" which was the text of a conference delivered by the same in a place I won't say.
But then Ettore wrapped his coils, from Hades, also the aforementioned Carlo De Benedetti who understood what no one else had understood, except Elserino Piol: the need to pass the salamander through the telecommunications fire. And here the book reveals the mystery of the ruin: we had Omnitel and Infostrada. We had to keep them and not sell them to Mannesmann who turned them into pork. We would have created a great pole of international telecommunications and perhaps prevented the most serious troubles that followed the privatization of Telecom. Instead we bought it in debt with a takeover bid whose history has not yet been written. I loved Tim of the origins so much, just as I loved Adriano's Olivetti immensely, that I carried my clouded judgment on my shoulders, like Aeneas, which clears up only now that I am at the threshold of the mountain from which you can see the end of life.
Reading Citelli's and Piol's book made me extraordinarily young again: in this book there is all the greatness that made those who believed in the myth of Hadrian and who continue to fight with their bare hands into Olivettians.
