87 We are also talking about an internal business school, set up by Adriano and entrusted to prestigious teachers, in which not only specific technical skills were taught, but also general and civil culture, history of industrial relations, history of economics and art. A school in which 90% of the worker apprentices, who entered at the age of fourteen, were placed in Olivetti's cadres, and in which the most deserving students were subsidized by the company with a scholarship for the Polytechnic of Turin. And we are talking about a library run by a manager of cultural services (and his right-hand man until his death) the likes of Geno Pampaloni, around which the Olivetti Cultural Center was built, with an internal sector for initiatives reserved for employees and their families and an external one, open to all, with a visionary, avant-garde, very high quality of contents. Between 1950 and 1964 the Salone dei Duemila saw a succession of conferences, debates and concerts, ancient and contemporary art exhibitions, international premieres, underground films, under seizure due to current censorship, theatrical plays, literary presentations, sometimes during the two hours scheduled for the lunch break, sometimes on Wednesday evenings – where, silent and in the last pews, Adriano himself often sat. On stage Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Carmelo Bene and Vittorio Gassman, Andy Warhol and Renato Guttuso, Edoardo de Filippo and Umberto Eco alternated: a splendid firmament of free thought. In the biography dedicated by Valerio Ochetto to Adriano Olivetti (2013) there are episodes, told by the live voice of the protagonists, that give light to the stature of a man who was an immense subversive. When Geno Pampaloni, as soon as he entered Olivetti, first removed the protective grids from the library shelves, the next day ten volumes were stolen. He reported it to Adriano, who replied Well! Then they read them! When he discovered that an employee falsified accounts for his personal interest, he hired a private investigator who told him that the man did not drink or gamble the stolen sums, but that he had a large family to deal with. Adriano calculated the monthly average of the missing money, called him and communicated an increase in his salary for the same amount. Olivetti's more than quintupled productivity had caused the saturation of the Italian market in 1958, which is why two analysts suggested him that he should have fired five hundred employees. He graciously thanked for the advice and doubled the sales force, hiring seven hundred more salespeople and inaugurating the CISV, a training center specialized in sales, to train salespeople on the basis of the first marketing model created in Italy and linked to the identity of a company. An identity to be built, communicated and handed down through a very powerful weapon, beauty, which Adriano Olivetti mastered making himself one of the protagonists of the post-war Artistic Capitalism, first of all introducing industrial design in Italy and contributing to the prestige of the Made in Italy brand all over the world. Thus, hand in hand with the care of growth and progress, in 1938 Adriano Olivetti overcame the fence of the company and established the Development and Advertising Office in Milan, detached from Ivrea, introducing artistic and humanistic skills next to the more canonical scientific and technical ones, involving famous and talented graphic designers and architects, poets and intellectuals to develop image strategies, design products, and to poetically communicate their values. Elegance and contemporary aesthetics become watchwords not only in the product, but also in the corporate strategy. In Ivrea, new technologies were developed, increasingly versatile and functional machines were studied, diversifying from writing to calculation, but it would have only been through the dialogue with the unusual Milanese outpost that those ideas would have taken the shape of product and found a commercial identity made of advertising languages, art objects, very refined showrooms. Art as a cultured component of a pioneer project of corporate identity. Art as an experimental device for an investigation of the languages of modernity. Art as a subversive tool, together with culture that brings awareness, sense of justice that brings fellowship, visionariness that brings into the future. Against tradition, in the direction of development and innovation which, in those years, was called electronics, in which he alone believed. Against an establishment entirely aimed at maintaining its feudal privileges, which opposed him well beyond his death. Against hostile competitors and relatives, fearful of a decline in dividends for his political10 and humanitarian commitment. Because, when things don't work out, unhinging a sick status quo is a must. Subverting is necessary. Doing it through beauty was the greatest lesson we could have learned from Olivetti Adriano, son of Camillo. Classification: subversive. 10 Adriano Olivetti made the Resistance, he saved people by hiding them in the trunk of his car all the way to Switzerland, risking his own skin. He was a promoter of the Action Party, he created the Community movement, he was a senator and mayor of Ivrea. All of Adriano's political thought would have become word in the three books published in no more than fifteen years: L’ordine politico delle Comunità (tr. The political order of Communities, 1946), Società, Stato, Comunità (tr. Society, State, Community, 1952) and Città dell’Uomo (tr. City of Man, 1960).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=