Work and civilization in an epoch of uncertainity: the Meeting of Rimini

Sunday 20th August – Saturday 26th August 2017. We all have participated together in the Meeting of Rimini.  This year’s inspiring and fundamental theme is literary, precisely deriving from J.W. Goethe’s Faust: “Re-deserve what you inherit from your fathers, then you can actually possess it”. A sentence introducing the theme of heritage as well as values, ethics, truth and history.

Companies between ethics and responsibility

Living in the society of information networking, we are literally immersed in viral data. Instead of simplifying the problem of truth and then of ethics, they make it even more complex. In fact, if unpredictability and uncertainty become the main principles deregulating our need for models of behaviour, we can still share the construction of human experiences, thus advancing in the process of civilization.

For this reason, talking about companies is useful if they configure themselves as a collective benefit finding its deep motivations in the attitudes of curiosity, desire and responsibility.

Hospitality: a personal significance

My participation in the Meeting of Rimini after 25 years is first of all an experience representing a totally significant and meaningful landmark in my life. In fact, over time, even though we can naturally evolve, our identity remains safe: now as then, it still represents an event of hospitality able to create community starting from its people, the authentical persons creating civilization together.

Continuing the debate on hospitality is more than ever a present and urgent necessity: in this epoch of new challenges to be faced without a manual of instructions, the valorization of both integration and identity is necessary.

Only this can be the real precondition towards a virtuous and positive dialogue in a globalized society needing globalized solutions: the recovery of strong relationships between ourselves and the others. History can explain this cohesion with its entirely humanistic roots.

Tradition and change

The accomplished itineraries carried out by companies’ businessmen introduce the theme of the shared construction of civilization: all the gathered testimonies are about those companies which the sons inherited from their fathers. Particularly, it has been wisely monitored the difficult coexistence and balance between tradition and change, with the awareness that true innovation lies in the conservation of an ethical track identity of one’s own family company.

Communication, knowledge and collaboration become the fundamental resources bringing innovation to the context of work: this happens in full compliance with the sustainable strategic perspective in companies and territories’ management. In fact, work represents a complete awareness of our own contribution to civilization: thanks to his industriousness, a man can joyfully and concretely create a positive result for himself and others too, according to an evolutionary perspective. “Il Sale della Terra” (“The Salt of the Land”) is an example of this: it was narrated by a few entrepreneurs from Calabria in an exhibition of the Meeting.

They all together have dedicated themselves to their land with the attention, passion and care of those who believe work is a value of beauty itself.

The creation of value

Other entrepreneurs’ testimonies are another example of this: they run their own company with courage and strength, thus emphasizing work as industriousness and following that precept of ennoblement, that already used to belong to the Byzantine and Benedictine monachism.

Individual action is thus addressed to the community in the sense of other people in general and future generations in an evolutionary perspective.

Through its work, man expresses his gratitude for the world around him (people, creatures, environment) and sets himself down to the creation of shared value.

This interpretation of work is the essential precondition of an evolutionary thought for the creation of shared value between companies, territories and communities.

The debated themes in the Meeting of Rimini express the most important and meaningful concepts of this perspective also sharing anthropological, sociological, philosophical and humanistic themes aiming at the development of civilization.