Ossigeno

40 41 A company must maintain its business and generate additional wealth belonging to the propert y. Probably an understatement, but certainly undeniable. Yet it wasn’t always this way. In the fourteenth century, the remnants of that economic empire of merchants who, in pursuing an infinite wealth, had crashed against the impoverishment of society, were the ones able to raise Florence up from the crack of its bankers. The companies of the time only re-emerged when they began to look at their cities, to share their possessions, through works in support of community’s well-being and economic and cultural development. Institutions and structures were born in that period, for example in the health sector, still today devoted to that service. Starting from a need of the impoverished society, the companies of the time added a social and caring purpose to personal profit . On the basis of this economic vivacity, Florence entered the wonderful era of the Renaissance . The tradition of companies with a further aim than the mere enrichment from the property is therefore centuries-old, and some of the best examples coincided with the great moments of change in the history of humanity . At this point, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how we got to the present condition, and a 1919 judgment, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company , stands as helpful. In 1916, with an accumulated capital of sixty million dollars, Henry Ford made investments aimed at raising wages and lowering sales prices, so that everyone could enjoy the benefits of an automobile and a life worthy of the name. For his minority shareholders, the Dodge brothers, the real purpose of a company had to be the wealth of the owner, and so they sued the founding partner. Ford explained in court: «My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this, we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business». On February 7, 1919, in front of the Michigan Supreme Court, Henry Ford lost the case . The points of contact with the fourteenth-century Florence were all there: the limits of growth as the only possibility, the needs of a society which, in order to return to prosperity, must know the well-being ensured by the most elementary rights. Today we add the unsustainability of the production process as an aim in itself . Time has shown that this approach is no longer bearable. The market says so, where more and more people are looking for other answers beyond the product; the Doughnut Economy of Professor Kate Raworth says so, in a structured way. A lecturer at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Raworth has developed a new economic design, freer from mathematics (unable to predict the consequences) and devoted to prosperity (and no longer to the mere growth). In this way, Professor Raworth has annihilated the economic design of the Cartesian plan by remodeling it into a doughnut - that, in fact, of the Doughnut Economy. Within this new design, the inner circumference of the doughnut represents the limit beyond which the inviolable rights of man cannot be lowered, such as access to food and water, essential services, voting and personal freedoms. The outer circumference, on the other hand, defines the boundary within which one must stop, before the consumption of the planet's soil and resources can irremediably affect the survival of the ecosystem. There is sustainability into the doughnut batter. If every human, corporate, municipal or national activity were defined within this new design, then sustainability would become a concrete discourse. The revolutionary impulse that Raworth has given to the world economy, with a kind of communication virtuous in purpose and exceptional in method, is starting to find, a century after the Ford-Dodge judgment, companies and cities moved by the same purpose and illuminated by what today represents the only way of development: the sharing of wealth, understood as economical, but also experiential and acquainted . That’s the real prosperity . A common feature of the great interpreters of this way of doing business is the incredible communicative vivacity manifested by promoting a value , a goal other than personal profit. On certain issues, a sort of unscrupulous marketing is possible in violence and color, and the expressive ability possessed by some kind of messages is always intense and engaging, where sincerity and the priority of purpose can take the stage. Shared values, in order to become everyone's commitment. A journalist applied to the food sector, in the early 2000s the Dutch Teun van de Keuken reported himself after having eaten seventeen bars of chocolate . His self-accusation was: exploitation of federico tosi estimable and inestimable. from company profit to company value