Imprese e letteratura

Two recent books try to redefine the economic and financial systems bringing them back to documents (Ferraris) and to instinctive drives (Mazzarella). This essay reviews some of the most important novels of the third millennium about entrepreneurs to test the cogency of these concepts. From American Pastoral by Philip Roth to Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk, from The Human Resources Manager by Abraham Yehoshua to Zero K by Don DeLillo, the essay describes the present world as a society of wasted desire and the life of the company as a constant search for meaning.

Imprese e mito personale

Considering the Jungian definition of ‘personal myth’ as a starting point for its hypothesis, the paper proposes a reading of the corporate identity that uses, at the same time, both the research tools offered by analytical psychology and the methods of literary criticism.

Impresa significante

Since 2008, a research team of Management Department (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) has been conducting various action-research projects to support the strategy reconsideration of many businesses, with the supervision of the author of the present paper. These experiences lead to the Significant Business Manifesto, which aspires to imagine a new entrepreneurial model for all the Italian businesses, but inspiring even for the single one. The proposed model is structured on gradually more actionable levels: vision, mission, strategy, and business model. Such levels should characterize the ideal type of Italian business and should guide the related questions which every actual business needs to answer.

Imprese e immaginario veneto

Through the following interviews we want to explore the collective imagination on business and companies, searching for a common ground between entrepreneurs and novelists. The focus is on Veneto region – and not the whole country – because of its peculiar development history, which can be traced on both sides, business and literature.

Imprese e generazioni

This article aims to offer a review of the possibilities offered by a ‘narrative’ approach to examine the succession in businesses through some meaningful examples. In the first part, the focus is on a strictly literary representation, i.d. the novel Il padrone by Goffredo Parise (1965), which is still relevant to date for its extraordinary attention (and artistic outcome) on dynamics in a family business context. In this novel the notion of ‘personal myth’ fulfils a particular role, with all its consequences for the business. In the second part, it is shown an obviously incomplete series of case-studies in which economists use literary techniques and tools to represent and/or analyse business intergenerational transition, especially in family business. In the third part, one of these studies – focused on the Berger family case – is examined more deeply to understand its theoretic choices and its scientific accomplishments, in order to wish for a real multidisciplinary approach to this topic, involving literary critics, theorists and linguists.

Impresa e narrazione in Italia

Under the pressure of an increasingly crowded and noisy competitive environment, companies face new challenges and meet new communication needs. The application of storytelling techniques for managerial practice uses tools that pertain to the world of literature. However, this is anything but new since the stories of companies are deeply intertwined in narrative structures and recurring archetypes. Throughout this chapter we will present the application of storytelling to satisfy different business objectives, first of all as a means to enhance and communicate culture and brand identity. In addition we will give an overview of some of the main realities that populate the panorama of business communication in Italy.

Imprese e storytelling

Telling one’s identity is a strategy on which public and private companies have begun to invest for a long time. If storytelling has always been understood as a means of interpreting and transmitting the corporate values, we are now moving to storytelling intended as a tool for realizing the identity of the company itself, and this identity is read as a fluid narrative that develops through the stories of its employees and stakeholders. Besides, storytelling is the oldest form of communication between individuals, and it can date back to the origin of our social life: humanity has always made meaning through narration. This paper, starting from theoretical studies on storytelling and the narrative thinking, investigates some samples of organizational storytelling in order to understand what are the advantages of a narrative approach over the reality of those who do business.