Fourteenth Variation
Corporate culture, competitiveness, success, profit and sector leadership can assume configurations with an overall humanistic character if strategically guided by a convinced, common and shared adherence to humanistic values.

However, to call the culture of a corporation “humanistic” it is not sufficient to have a “humanistically oriented direction”, which accepts or limits itself to introduce every now and then into the organizational time-spaces some novels, a film that make one think beyond business, or a bit of theatre that is not the obvious, everyday psychodrama about human relationships. And, perhaps, some opportunities to relate about oneself at the end of the day or in a self-writing laboratory, provided as necessary. Here we are talking about management in which poetry, art and philosophy, also conceived as operational instruments aimed at overcoming the sectorial languages, become metadisciplinary catalyzers to foster organizational integration, develop new ways of managing personnel and innovate corporate culture. In this sense, corporate culture can be invigorated by the introduction of magic realism. The essence of magic realism, a category born to describe the metaphysical painting of Carrà and then also used in other fields (the literature of García Márquez, for example, but also in a film like the outstanding Beyond the Garden Gate), consists in knowing how to bring together familiar objects, if not of everyday use, which however we normally experience separately from one another. To observe them depicted in an apparently inexplicable combination throws open the door to new possible interpretations of reality, allows access to new levels of awareness and understanding of the “facts”. It is a question of placing the interlocutors, as Trupia writes, in front of the presence on stage of incongruous and diverse objects, which have however the power to summon the reader and put him/her on the same wavelength as the author, entering into a communicative setting, already prepared for him/her, but which respects perceptive autonomy. Thus, a reader that works with the author on producing the sense of the text.

To achieve this objective, not only is it necessary to work on the inter/metadisciplinarity, but also to make literature, theatre and philosophy interact with traditional management knowledge, to extract whatever good things can still be found: bring Shakespeare to corporate life, Musil to Customer Relationship Management, Achab and Bartlebly to Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge, Robinson Crusoe to the Balanced Scorecard and so on. The experiment, conducted by the journal “Hamlet” and lasting several years has shown that it is possible. Taken to its extreme consequences, it is an epistemological approach that not only allows the unveiling of new levels of significance beneath (or above) the more trivial and everyday one on which, for laziness, we tend to stabilize (that prosaic realism that, according to Flaiano, “puts tragic limits on every illusion and, on its own, never reaches its limits”, but which can lead to the discovery made by “Writer B”: “Utterly fantastic works are twice-fold true, because fantasy has rules that must be respected; which does not hold for reality, entrusted to chance and inconsistent”. (The citations are taken from Diario degli errori (Diary of errors) by Ennio Flaiano, Adelphi, 2003. The first is on page 21, the second on page 15).

Can the corporation, which by now has understood how vital continual learning is, permit itself to make space not only for a few eccentric, humanistic “crumbs of knowledge”, but a humanistically pervasive and fruitful acculturation of itself, and obviously, also for profit? As corporate culture, before it even claims to be scientific or humanistic, pays attention to profit: it is a profit community. It is therefore not sufficient to find middle courses between techno-organizational knowledge marked by negotium with a decisional calling and knowledge marked by otium with a pleasurable and circensian calling. It is necessary to give entrepreneurial roots to an existentially and not just aesthetically intended humanistic behaviour: otherwise we must accept that, at most, humanistic management looks after decorating the corridors with paintings by well-known painters and better posters.

If, instead, by humanistic we nowadays wish it to mean a culture inspiring operational thinking and creativity, as well as a way of acting, producing and communicating, we must put in check any all-absorbing vision that has never had anything to do with humanisms. Today, all too often enterprises are still total micro/macro companies, sustained by ideologies that deceive teamwork, the development of human relationships and convivial occasions as “humanistic” and humanizing openings. In which there is a more subtle mobbing than that of marginalization and isolation – it is the draining of will. There is no longer physical violence in the contemporary enterprise, but there is psychological violence. This, besides being an abuse of people, damages the enterprise itself. It is a perfect example of genuine cruelty, the stupid type.

Therefore, it is not really a question of humanizing the methods, strategies and relational modes, but rather of conceiving direction and management as continuous cultural planning and monitoring, reassigning to management one of its highest pedagogic and ethical functions: a theme, the latter, on which the “scientific managers” have accumulated large misunderstandings. Their (understandable) preoccupation is to establish ethics on solid ground, and thus traditional organizing, to avoid it being reduced to a simple declaration of good intentions. Therefore, sanctions, disciplinary commissions, an ethical code and red alerts are provided for. One thus arrives at those formulas such as “business ethics” and the “reputation effect”. Deterministic formulas that have nothing to do with the nature of ethics. Ethics, completely to the contrary, unleashes vital force and energy only if formulated and practiced as a free undertaking, if not sanctioned, if not subjected to jurisdictional procedures. Ethics live and have sense only in a climate, in a culture and as a freely undertaken and personally professed obligation, supported by a testimony that, first of all, must be top-down. Free ethics – though the expression is tautological – involves the reduction of all hierarchical, centralized, sanctionary, punitive and even reward giving steering and control instruments in favour of an autonomous convergence of initiatives, together with self-control and freely undertaken personal responsibility.

Yet, up to what point can an organizational practice inspired by shared values integrate with or overcome the level of standardization in the enterprise? In reality, it is nothing more than a value-oriented practice that must absolutely be opposed to an adjustment to regulations and procedures.

Instead, in Hegel’s terms, one can speak of Aufhebung, “sublation”: values can get over regulations and procedures by comprising, simplifying and reducing them. Too firm an opposition by values to regulations and procedures might, in the current context, even appear to be serving as a means for not very correct behaviour: Enron received continual testimonials of esteem for its respect of values, inside and outside, but in the meantime it violated regulations, procedures and the law. At the same time, a corporation regulated just by regulations and procedures is an uncompetitive corporation, before being not very hospitable. In any case, when one talks of values that are such, namely the outcome of ethical relations, there is no sense in identifying conflict between them and the regulations/procedures of good management: it is rather more a question of finding the right balance.

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