[gioele]

> Excellent technical history, but it misses what made Olivetti incomparable: Adriano's human-centric philosophy that business and human culture were inseparable. > > The article mentions worker housing and urban planning in passing, then moves on. But that was the strategy. Ivrea wasn't welfare—it was integrated design. Factory, housing, schools, public spaces all operating under one coherent philosophy: machines and lives should both be beautiful and functional. > > [...] > > That's why Olivetti succeeded where technically equivalent competitors didn't. They engineered for humans, not just machines.

Two decades ago I randomly found myself in a tiny lecture room with a Very Important Manager from a Very Big European Bank. She started her talk stating "In the '80s, the Italian politics had to choose between the economic model of the Olivetti's family and that of the Agnelli's family. They choose Agnelli's. That was a mistake." Followed by a long string of expletives.

For context and for contrast, the Agnelli family was the owner of FIAT, then the biggest private employers in Italy. They were strongly anti-unions. They even bought the most important newspaper in Turin (the headquartiers of FIAT) to suppress reports of workers initiatives and strikes.

[rm30]

true, '80s were the years that signed the switch from an economy based on products and services (Olivetti) to an economy based on financial papers (Agnelli). If the 1st one was more human sized, the second one forgot about people.

The fall of Berlin wall was signalling that politicians were all with "us".