The Enterprise: an "Ideal" City

Enterprises, in order to make real innovation, should have a priority: it represents a radical mutation which involves primarily the concepts of person and work. Enterprises, first of all, should understand people are the authentic and true core of every activity and the added value for the company which makes business. This has as a consequence workers have responsibility and this view could be properly explained, paraphrasing a fragment of speech of John F.Kennedy, by the motto: “please, do not ask what the enterprise can do for you, but what you can do for it”. Therefore, the management of an enterprise should be based on exchange and energetic circularity: this element generates real sharing and, consequently, introduces the concept of “active participation” or “responsible participation”. The enterprise is competitive if, first of all, people who create it are in this way, too: distributing responsibility in order to reach a joint objective represents a key phase in this process. The logic is the one of horizontal and democratic community in which not only charges weigh heavily on every citizen, but also – and most of all – honours should be left to them: in this sense, innovation means learning the lesson of the past as well as being enterprise which deals with innovation means, in a way, rediscovering the ideal of egalitarian polis imagined by Plato or the ideal locus theorized by Thomas More some centuries after. These visions which, over the centuries, had been proposed by numerous thinkers culpably remained a utopia. In the world of management of enterprise, this ideal community can and must be realized through the sharing of a joint horizon which can be reached only by “responsible participation” of everyone. If businessmen of today and, most of all, the ones of tomorrow will be enlightened and will be able to recognize the coordinates of hierarchy are not positioned in the vertical axis any more, but in the horizontal one, then this real process of innovation, needed by enterprises and claimed by contemporary and future humanity, can be implemented.