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The Circle of Trust<\/p><\/div>\n
Truly a leader\u2019s main capacity<\/b> is to always see challenges in terms of opportunity, and people as valuable assets to put at work for conquering such opportunities. This is thinking strategically,<\/b> and this is also thinking successfully<\/b> in a way that brings everyone in the Organization on-board and fully engaged pursuing the Company\u2019s objectives with creativity and passion.<\/p>\n
There is the famous example of an Italian Company – Olivetti<\/b> – which unfortunately is little known abroad today because our language is not the most common in the business world and the publications are only in Italian. It\u2019s the company that invented the PC, the Program 101<\/b>, which brought Man on the Moon<\/b>, and the first fully transistorized Mainframe Computer, the ELEA 9001<\/b>, back in the \u201950s and \u201960s. In the mid \u201850s there was a temporary overproduction<\/b> crisis, due to the continuous increase in the productivity of the Company, which was pursuing continuous innovation and had a very good production management and staff continuous training programs. Some executives insisted for the easiest way out<\/b>: shutting down facilities and massive lay-offs. Adriano Olivetti, President and CEO, abhorred the laying-off <\/b>of people and was an entrepreneur to the last of his body cells<\/b>. He thus sacked the managers who were insisting for shutting down and lay-offs – incapable of creative business-generating thinking and bound to the cost-cutting mindset – and instead designed a completely new sales business model<\/b>, calling in a new sales management and founding a sales people training centre that was at the cutting edge of the knowledge in the field at the time. Of course the business results were astonishing<\/b>, and the Company was incredibly profitable for all the coming years. Olivetti is still a leadership and business strategy model widely studied today from scholars, albeit little known to the general public.<\/p>\n
To conclude these reflections, what I want to share with you is a conviction, founded on experience and some science, that a business leader<\/b> should never think<\/b> that lay-offs<\/b> are a real strategic option<\/b> for the long term success of an Organization. They maybe the outcome of unfortunate previous choices, or of the lack of farsightedness to foresee the need for change in business model, market, technology. The Organization lives in an environment<\/b>, and is part of one or more communities<\/b> that it shares with its internal stakeholders. Harming them, will harm the Company in the long term<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Human beings, the Leader\u2019s People<\/b>, instead, are the most precious asset<\/b> to whom we leaders owe our strongest commitment<\/b> to help them raise their knowledge and skills to more interesting and fruitful deeds, in the pursuit of a better satisfaction of the stakeholders\u2019 needs – all of them.<\/p>\n
Industry 4.0<\/b> will really be a Revolution for good<\/b> if it keeps the human being at the centre of its strategy, while implementing all the technology that can be developed by the intelligence of human beings for the benefit of other human beings.\u00a0Otherwise it will just be the last of a series of delusions<\/b> and a dead-end<\/b> road to our future on this planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have recently been a Speaker at an important international conference about Industry 4.0, where a major focus was on automation and increase in productivity. As [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n