Sixth Variation
Humanistic management takes technology, with its automatisms and expert systems, back to its original nature of a means and not an end, but it also wants to assume the responsibility of its effects through a reflective process, or rather be able to reflect on the consequences, and before this on the prerequisites, of technological, economic and regulatory productivity.

To define new ways of production, without falling into the impasse of post-modernity, alternative ways of producing economic value (utility) compared to old modernity must be described positively. Ways that do not forgo the strength of the automatisms and the expert systems, but which break with self-reference, withdrawing the previously conferred authorization. The automatisms and expert systems are not neutral and are not omnipotent. On the contrary, their operation generates unforeseen and undesired effects, heaping the risks of a complexity that exceeds the means put into the field for controlling it on the shoulders of people, corporations and territories.

If this is so, a new way of doing and of being management is necessary, which sets the automatisms and expert systems in motion, but which is also willing to assume the responsibility of their effects, proposing itself as a reflective process, or rather a process capable of reflecting on the consequences of its technological, economic and regulatory productivity and equipping itself for changing the premises on the basis of which these mechanisms and expert systems are called to act.

The right setting in which to read the passage from scientific management to humanistic management is that of reflective synchronicity. In fact, reflection, responsibility and self-correction cannot be left out, nor can they be assigned to other specialized organizations. It is internal learning that must cultivate a plural space of possibilities, so that choices do not start as one-dimensional and straightforward, but where aspects on which reflection is needed, effects for which answers may be required, and the possibilities of monitoring and preventive correction, are considered right from the beginning. It is therefore necessary to pluralize – giving a dialogic soul – automatisms and expert systems born to operate in a simple and one-dimensional manner.

At corporate level, this process can only be founded on an in-depth, individual reflexivity. In this framework, the humanist is the manager who takes on all of the delight and burden of a more lucid and radical historical conscience of himself/herself, of his/her own past to be rescued from oblivion, whatever it has been, because the awareness of one’s own story is the first step to counting oneself as human. It is of no little significance that the act of writing, documenting and conserving what has been experienced has affirmed itself as the highest manifestation of perception of one’s subjectivity. The humanistic legacy is anything but a consolatory abstraction or purely with aesthetic leanings: above all, it is the return of a material-based existence to oneself. There is more to learn from a page of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, or from those individual and collective “diaries”, a.k.a. blogs (or more precisely CMS – Content Management Systems), on the Internet, than from a thousand volumes of traditional management literature. The writing of one’s own story is an opportunity of concentration, meditation and reflection that, in the Renaissance period and in its prolongations, would have been known as moral exercise for the inner attainment of one’s “manly” or “womanly age”, as the case may be.

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