In the monastery to refine the intangible skills that make the difference in business management. The experience of Carlotta Giovetti, CEO and president of the Trenton manufacturing company
There is the Iot, or the Internet of things, but also the Sot, that is the Spirit of things. There is homo oeconomicus, but he cannot forget about homo simbolicus. Change management must relate to the spiritual dimension and it is a corporate culture to guide with the spirit.
This is the essence of the Spem executive path designed by the Graduate School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, which explores an intangible but real link between management and spirituality. “It is a fascinating and extremely challenging path,” he confides Carlotta Giovetti, CEO and president of Trenton, the family business that has a turnover of 35 million in engineering with 140 employees. In these days he is preparing to leave the company to live two days in a Buddhist monastery near Parma. “This too is an experience included in the course of the master – he says -, which allowed us to read our being company captains with the eyes of a Catholic theologian, a Waldensian archbishop, experts in quantum physics and, now , even to come to live an intense personal experience in a space such as a monastery ».
Born to deal with intangible aspects in the workplace, the path is aimed at those who have responsibility for managing people and organizations because, as a successful CEO said, Giovetti recalls, “the things that really matter are those you can’t touch. , which escape the normal systems of control and planning, but which are decisive for the success or failure of a company ».
Carlotta Giovetti measures the veracity of these assertions every day and in a context that cannot be more manufactured than this. «Think of the rites – she observes. A company thrives on rituals, such as that of the coffee break. Blame it or look at it as the moment in which relationships are consolidated, in which what goes or doesn’t go in the wards comes to the surface in all its truthfulness? ». And then the role and space of myths: another theme that seems very far from the pragmatic nature of business life and which, instead, “is decisive, especially in the generational transition”, says the entrepreneur, who has lived fully. «The founder is, in most cases, the myth and we have to deal with him. Knowing well that he – he adds – he is a source of positive tension, but at the same time he must be broken so that his own creature can continue innovating ».
Giovetti is halfway through his career, but he already looks at this experience as a special opportunity that he wanted to grant himself. “It does not provide formulas or strategies that are applied the next day in the office – he considers -, but gives the opportunity to look at oneself and one’s work with a different pair of glasses, for deeper and longer-range transformations”.