Never before has interest in Italian companies grown significantly as in recent times. In part this is due to the respectable performance of Made in Italy companies around the world which have proposed solutions and winning formulas on the market, different and more competitive than their consolidated foreign competitors. Italian companies have become global players in a more explicit way, favoring acquisition processes and attracting attention as an original formula, in some ways iconic, of a management model. However, the debate on the potential of an "Italian management model" is still very timid, it remains anchored to very traditional categories and to a reading by difference with respect to standards and benchmarking reconstructed on the copious managerial literature, conditioned by the exclusive observation of the functioning of large companies multinational.
There is, both in literature and in practice, a convergent opinion on the fact that there is no Italian differential in terms of management. The datum that would seem to characterize a certain specificity is the family trait, which obviously is not only Italian, generally considered as an element to be neutralized and not valued. Through this reading key, decisions in terms of growth, governance and management are explained. Basically, the current success is just a lucky cyclical coincidence of a phenomenon that has nothing different or particular with respect to mechanisms and logics widely studied at an international level.
The option proposed in Luigi Serio's book "Medie excellence", published by Guerini and associates, is obviously different: in other words, it is believed that there are some specific conditions on which to re-knit the threads of a manufacturing "renaissance" and that some distinctive features emerge which can help describe and perhaps, in perspective, outline the contours of a possible Italian management model.
In the background remain some unresolved questions in the debate on the evolution of the Italian capitalist system.
A first reflection concerns the theme of growth. The debate on "dwarfism" in our production system is essentially without interruption. On the one hand there is still a prevalence of considering the small-medium size as a limit, a problem to be faced and a challenge in the coming years. The classic reading is that of freeing the company from the constraints that hold back growth, of a managerial, organizational or financial nature. Different indications that come from a specific research activity (cf. among all Boldizzoni, Serio Il Fenomeno Piccola Impresa, 1996) are always considered the results of virtuous episodes, partly occasional, of a system that continues to be weak. The data says otherwise and the readings in this volume support this point of view. The problem is not being big in order to be competitive, but being competitive tout court. The problem related to the breadth of the markets or the financial leverage needed to be present in the global market can be solved in different ways, each company develops its own option:
• who focuses and becomes a leader in a specific geographic market;
• who becomes the main actor of a unique niche and expertise;
• who entrusts to others, by selling, the search for resources out of the current reach;
• who activates alliance strategies to share costs, risks and learning processes.
Today the theme of economies of scale moves from production to commercial channels, an area of greater flexibility and shared initiative. On this issue, albeit in different ways, all the perspectives of analysis present in the book "Excellent averages" converge. Studies of a more distinctly economic-managerial nature define more precise boundaries, the "threshold" of the average company concerns more than one dimension, a precise awareness of one's business, declaring the overcoming of a purely artisan dimension and clearly "customs clearance" the company profile. In other words, there are different ways to compete on the market; if the strategy is to adopt a behavior typical of a large company, monitoring of channels, efficiency of factors, investment in resources, size becomes critical; if the positioning on the market is other and different from the large ones, reasoning in terms of size is misleading and displaces attention and reflection from the real issues. If today the theme is to be active and symmetrical players in global supply chains, the enabling factor is competence, less size.
A second consideration concerns the entrepreneur.
He is the central figure and the leading theme of all the essays in "Medie Excellent". Whether it is an agent of change, whether it is a potential "new productive bourgeoisie", or a promoter of a widespread tension towards "beauty", the medium-sized company and the entrepreneur are an indissoluble bond. From the essays emerges an entrepreneur director of the connective tissue on which the company's competitive advantage is built, defender of a technical-technological primacy, of the professional community on whose knowledge develops and builds value, manager and/or participant in a supply chain relationships that compete globally and move to where the most favorable market conditions exist. Also in this case the theme is not choosing between ownership and management, it is an inseparable unicum in which the construction of value lies in the hold of the created alchemy. In the event of the sale of Italian companies, the practice of the new owners to ask for continuity of management is increasingly widespread; buying a small-medium business means buying a brand, a system of relationships that generates the uniqueness and beauty of the product, but above all the human and social capital that supports it. In this perspective, the "alleged" defense of Italianness passes through the enhancement of the social fabric, not in the regulation and protection of purchase/sale phenomena, which have always generated distortions and interruptions to the natural logical flows, both in terms of defense and resignations. Protection must again be about skills, certainly less about ownership.
A third consideration concerns the organizational model. Over the years, the "Italian" management model has developed around the role of the leading company which, in a bary-centric and asymmetrical manner, has regulated the flow of relations with the rest of the company population, to which to give directions and from which to draw resources in a flexible way, generating what Gianni Lorenzoni defined in an exemplary way «limited but widespread entrepreneurship» (Lorenzoni G., L'architettura di Sviluppo dell'Impresa Minore, il Mulino, 1990).
The leading companies were born in the districts, have followed their evolution, have been the protagonists of the natural selection process of our entrepreneurial system in recent years, they are the real witnesses! of Made in Italy in the world. Today competitive pressures, new markets and technologies and different consumers impose new challenges and new organizational models. The knowledge process will be increasingly shared, the more open and "known" supply chains, the processing of Big Data and the affirmation of the technologies included in the Industry 4.0 phenomenon will once again change the shape of our relationship system which will be increasingly symmetrical, shared and strategic. In other words, the emergence of the network economy and organization, finally not as an icon to protect the status quo, but as a tool for strategy and the creation of value and competitiveness over time.
