Manager and Mayor E-Book

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• Herausgeber: Post Editori
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The book traces the history, also thanks to many qualified testimonies, of Lorenzo Bosetti, who left us at the age of 83. Valdagno, a city that, together with Schio, is historically marked by a fruitful social and economic relationship with its iconic company, remembers him during the years in which he was an energetic protagonist, first as manager of Marzotto and then as first citizen in a period of revitalisation of the local community, at the dawn of the Second Republic. A Piedmontese, born in Rivoli on 14 February 1939, with a passion for economics and a liberal culture, Bosetti was a leader. In his ‘two lives’ in Valdagnese, he demonstrated this with Sabaudian authority. He did so as manager of Marzotto when he completed important business operations. It was the peak of his professional career, after which he put his experience at the service of public affairs. It was 1995 and for the first time the municipality directly elected its mayor. In that context, Bosetti was the candidate of a civic centre-left that shaped the city for years to come.
In the background of the story - thanks to Giorgio Gori's contribution - is the great theme of the vision of the future of the many city-businesses, of how synergies can be built between economy and society, and of how these original figures of mayoral managers can succeed in combining administrative capacity, pragmatism and vision of the future.

Leseprobe

introduction

part one: A man at the service of the company and the city

CHAPTER 1: DANTE SQUARE

CHAPTER 2: TRUCKS grazing walls

CHAPTER 3: MOTHER PIACENTINI Cleans little Anna’s face

CHAPTER 4: THAT ANNOYING Fleming

CHAPTER 5: The limping duck

CHAPTER 6: Solitary coffees in exile

CHAPTER 7: MAYOR’s obligations

CHAPTER 8: The horse’s move

CHAPTER 9: fifteen minutes BY BICYCLE

CHAPTER 10: THE LAST BONUS

CHAPTER 11: The engine of engines

CHAPTER 12: Save me ribbons

CHAPTER 13: Sensitive parish priests

CHAPTER 14: NOT like IN TREVISO

CHAPTER 15: POSTS AND TWEETS: LAST CHANCE

CHAPTER 16: NUMBER 746

PART TWO: TESTIMONIES

TESTIMONY OF EMILIO PERARDI AND SAINT UNGARO: marzotto towards modernity

BRUNO ZANINI’s TESTIMONY: bosetti’s mistrust

GIANNI MION’s TESTIMONY: a hint of bosetti

SERGIO SPILLER’s TESTIMONY: marzotto and the challenges of internationalisation

JEAn DE JAEGHER’s TESTIMONY: relational challenges

matteo marzotto’s TESTIMONY: bosetti in the foreground

Bosetti municipal administrator

luigi dalla via’s TESTIMONY: the tunnel

riccardo ferrasin’s TESTIMONY: bosetti mayor

afterword: Bosetti, a master for me

EDITOR’S NOTE

introduction

by Giorgio Gori

I did not have the opportunity to meet Lorenzo Bosetti, but I had heard of him during the years when he was mayor. So much so that a few years ago I was curious to get to know him better, through some newspaper articles that profiled him, certainly not imagining that one day I would be asked to write a short introduction to his biography. Today it is an honour for me to try to draw from his and my work and life experience, similar in some ways and very different in others, some considerations on the intertwining of the professional dimension and the dimension of ‘service’ that has characterised his and my civic commitment in our respective city communities. And to try to make it a matter of perhaps useful reflection for other administrators.

From the ‘mayor manager’ - as he is still remembered in Valdagno - several traits distinguish me, starting with the fact that hardly anyone has ever called me that in Bergamo. For many years I was manager of a large company, Mediaset. But a network director is a sui generis manager, at least compared to a man of numbers, an expert in accounting and financial planning as Bosetti had been in his long and successful season at Marzotto. These skills Bosetti had no difficulty in transferring them to the public dimension, not infrequently finding himself teaching the subject to the managers and officials of the municipality of which he became mayor. I in turn had budgets to respect, but as a manager I administered a much more creative subject, whose most relevant numbers were those of television ratings, which in turn were to be translated into advertising revenue. What I mean by this is that it was not the rigour of financial calculations that characterised my managerial experience, nor qualified my two terms as mayor. The numbers of a municipality’s budget are even more stringent than those of a company - since it is not allowed to close a financial year in deficit - but I have always considered economic resources as a means, or at most as a constraint, certainly not as an end.

My experience as an entrepreneur was different - it lasted exactly ten years, straddling the seventeen I spent at Mediaset and the next ten dedicated to public administration - and was tackled in 2001 with the hesitation of a beginner (and the question that has always accompanied me at every turn: ‘Will I be capable?’). Magnolia has been an adventure full of trepidation and enthusiasm, crowned by objective success and enormous gratification, both professional and human: ten wonderful years; so wonderful that at the end I said to myself that it was right to put a stop to it, to thank Heaven for the opportunities I had had, and to try in some way to give back what fortune had given me.

It was 2011, a very special year, marked by a sense of great precariousness and apprehension for our country. It was also the year, I think, that prompted me to think about the need to dedicate time and energy to ‘the community’. I had no clear idea how I was going to do it: where, in what context, and above all with whom. But I felt it was right to do it. I tried to make my contribution to growing a reformist, liberal and modern left-wing proposal, and I still believe that at that time it was the most useful thing that could be done for the country. From there was born a season of government that, without having directly involved me, carried out - as far as it could - an important reforming task.

In the meantime, I focused on what my dimension could be, concrete and pragmatic almost as much as my previous professional experiences had been: I wanted to commit myself to my city. Thus was born the candidacy for mayor of Bergamo in 2014, a new page of commitment and work that has filled the last ten years of my life. Was I a ‘manager mayor’, like Lorenzo Bosetti in Valdagno? Not really, in my opinion. If anything, more an ‘entrepreneur mayor’, insofar as I have tried every day of my service to improve the city, with the eagerness to do, and to innovate, to make it more beautiful, more dynamic, more attractive, and more effective in caring for its most fragile citizens. I come from studies of architecture - never translated into the practice of the profession - undertaken because I was fascinated by a profession in which I seemed to grasp a harmonious balance of creativity and concreteness. I did not become an architect, but I realise that I have always sought the same mix, the same balance in the activities that I have carried out in my life. And so also as mayor. I dreamt of a possible future for my city and tried to realise it. I was not able to do everything I wanted, but a lot. And it was great to invent, to look for solutions, to find the resources, energies and collaborations to realise the most ambitious projects.

Certainly the love for our respective cities brings me closer to the figure of Lorenzo Bosetti. He was from Piedmont, but his long tenure at the top of Marzotto had made him an extremely popular figure for the citizens of Valdagno. So much so that when he decided to run for mayor, few doubted his chances of being elected. Both because they knew his determination - when Bosetti set his mind to something, it was difficult for him not to achieve it - and because ‘everyone knew him’. And almost everyone esteemed him. Of course popularity is one thing, the credibility needed to be chosen for the role of first citizen is quite another. I too in my own way was quite well-known in the city before I ran for office in 2014. But my (relative) popularity had little to do with Bergamo, having matured on a professional scene far removed from the dimension I was entering. For some I was still the ‘director of Canale 5’, for others ‘Cristina Parodi’s husband’. From there it took a lot to get me accepted and supported as a candidate for mayor of the centre-left, so much so that paradoxically it was more difficult to overcome those prejudices - which was necessary to be a candidate - than to obtain the citizens’ vote.

However, I think it was realised that what really moved me was my love for the city. After all, it must be something irrational, like love, that makes you choose a commitment that is all-consuming and full of pitfalls, without it being accompanied by the slightest financial satisfaction (on the contrary).

I believe it was like that for Lorenzo Bosetti, who had learnt to know and love Valdagno from his special vantage point - the factory - and it was like that for me, who was born in Bergamo and has always stubbornly wanted to keep it as a ‘safe harbour’, enduring 27 years of commuting to Milan to keep my roots there, and then choosing to ‘make a family’ of it and raise my children there. Being mayor of one’s own city - or of the one that has become one - allows one to concretise the desire to give back what one has received from that community, first and foremost in terms of training, and I have indeed received a great deal from Bergamo.

Browsing through Lorenzo Bosetti’s biography, I discovered several aspects that make him close to me. The stubbornness, the willingness to work hard to achieve a result; the difficulty, at times, of accepting the rituals and mediations to which politics tends to subject you, the allergy to ceremonial. On the other hand, the distance from the working methods of a private company represents the real obstacle to overcome for those who decide to dedicate themselves to administrative politics, especially for those who - manager or entrepreneur - are used to being ‘the boss’. And this in spite of the fact that the mayor - by reason of the direct mandate obtained from the citizens - is probably the closest institutional figure to that of a company boss: he has no direct powers over the municipal machine but chooses his own team, and over the course of five years he can count on a large council majority, if only he is able to preserve its cohesion.

Yet the difference is enormous. Both for the necessary observance of everything that in the public dimension safeguards the principle of impartiality - and therefore subjects every selection, appointment or assignment to public evidence procedures - and for the clear separation between political and technical structure, imposed by the Bassanini law of ‘97, which for anyone working in a private organisation is absolutely inconceivable. For those like me - and like Bosetti, no doubt - who are used to selecting a collaborator or entrusting an assignment simply by picking up the phone, I guarantee that the difference is sidereal, and at first, no matter how prepared one may be, quite shocking. The same for the separation of politics and administration. I read in his biography that Bosetti had profoundly introjected this principle, which he strictly adhered to: to the political power the task of indicating directions and projects, to the administrative structure the task of implementing them. For me, knowing how much care in the execution of any initiative is decisive for its success, it was and is very difficult to accept not having direct control over the technical structure. And I still think that it is not a good set-up that excludes any kind of hierarchical relationship between those who have been chosen by the citizens - and whom the citizens see as responsible for everything that happens in the city anyway, that is, for the work of the entire administration - and those on whom the implementation of every decision essentially depends. Within the technical component, the mayor chooses only the Director General, whose appointment is linked to the mandate of the first citizen, but not even he - on closer inspection - is really the ‘superior’ of the executives of the various sectors, nor does he have effective instruments to reward the commitment and efficiency of some or sanction the poor implementation of others. And so from level to level.

The non-existence of a true hierarchical structure, and the impossibility of implementing an effective system of recognising merits and demerits continue in my eyes to represent two points of obvious weakness in the management of a municipal administration (and any other public administration). I do not know what Bosetti thought exactly, but I suspect that, despite the rigour with which he adhered to the principles of the law, in his heart he shared my point of view. And in fact, witnesses say, he would go into the projects, modify them, study them at night. How can you give up, after all, dealing with it? If there is one thing I have learnt, from my experiences in the private and public sectors, it is that 10 per cent of the result depends on inspiration, and 90 per cent on the quality of execution; and that attention to detail is crucial. The goodness of the result is the result of maniacal attention to detail.

Being a mayor - not unlike being an entrepreneur - generally requires a ‘divergent’ outlook. Indeed, one must be able to cultivate grand visions, and work towards the achievement of strategic goals, which very often extend far beyond one’s term of office and are not always aligned with short-term interests - this entails certain risks of unpopularity that a good mayor must not be afraid to face. And at the same time one must avoid losing sight of the details, the small things that are nonetheless decisive for the quality of life of citizens. When I decided to run for re-election in 2019, I filled several notebooks with notes collected during a series of ‘Coffees with the Mayor’, which I offered in bars in the various neighbourhoods to citizens who wanted to tell me what they thought should be done - or done better - in the possible mandate to come. Well, in these conversations, I did not hear requests for major infrastructure works or urban regeneration, or major plans for sustainable mobility, but only requests and reminders for small interventions: the resurfacing or widening of a pavement, the creation of a small park or an area for dogs, the provision of a few speed bumps to enforce the 30 mph ban on a certain street. It would be serious if a mayor limited himself to this order of interventions: the city would grind to a halt; but it would be just as serious if he ignored them, because after all, the possibility of living in the city in a safe and dignified manner - for so many people - depends precisely on the care that the administration takes with these small things.

I have no doubt that Bosetti therefore attached great importance to it, and this without losing sight of how the construction of the tunnel between Valdagno and Schio could represent an absolute priority for the development not only of his town but of the entire Agno valley.

This is how it has been for me in recent years. The search for the funding needed to realise a number of fundamental works for collective mobility - the rail link with Orio al Serio airport, the tramway connecting with the Valle Brembana, the doubling of the railway line that crosses the entire metropolitan area from east to west, the Bergamo-Dalmine surface electric line, not to mention the expansion of the airport and the great effort to limit its environmental impact - together with a very long series of regeneration projects for disused areas or buildings: projects designed to make the city more beautiful, attractive and accessible, to reduce private traffic and improve air quality, to encourage the establishment of new functions and attract talent and investment. Not everything has met with the immediate approval of the citizens, and sometimes not even that of the majority political forces, often sensitive to the protests of organised groups, with whom it has therefore been necessary to engage in a confrontation that - without ever having to explicitly ‘place confidence’ - has in some cases required the full authority of the role of the first citizen to be spent. After all, either you do this or you don’t have to be mayor.

If I had to say, however, what is the ‘figure’ that is most likely to distinguish a mayor with a professional business background from one who has had no such experience, it is the different attitude - a different and more extensive trust - towards private individuals and civil society in general, understood as the sum total of entrepreneurial and civic expressions. On many occasions I have encountered, among those who work for the public administration, a great diffidence towards all that is private, and above all towards the ‘private for profit’; a diffidence shared by managers and civil servants, as well as by many politicians (not only on the left), as if what is public had to guard against the risk of ‘contaminating’ itself with private interest, or as if public interest was necessarily incompatible and in conflict with that of private individuals. I am convinced of the opposite. The public side has extremely limited means and resources. If it had to rely only on these, the public interest would not fare well, and this is as much in the realisation of projects capable of generating development, work and welfare as in the fields of care and treatment of the frail, or in culture.

The idea that has guided me over the years is that the real energies, the ones that can make a difference, reside primarily in society, and that the task of the public authority is to arouse them, to encourage them, and to steer them in the direction of the collective good. To this end, it is decisive to build a climate of ‘industrious trust’, to which the public administration is the first to contribute through its proactivity, the effectiveness of its investments and the efficiency of its technical structure.

is a vision that is profoundly oriented towards subsidiarity - in this case ‘horizontal’; I am also a firm supporter of ‘vertical’ subsidiarity, for the transfer of powers, responsibilities and resources as close as possible to the citizens, on the ground, but that would take us a long way - as well as being firmly anchored, in my view, to the principles of the healthiest liberal socialism. I do not know what Bosetti called it, but in the words he used to explain the importance of public works I find my own ‘philosophy’. “Our private assets have lost value in recent years,” he said on one occasion, “because there is no demand. Few people want to buy because there is no development, no confidence in the future. I believe that public works should also serve to instil confidence in entrepreneurs and citizens that with their industriousness and investments they will succeed in bringing about lasting change. A nice smile is being given to us by the citizens who, in large numbers, are repainting their houses with a flourish of colours, cheerfulness and good taste. it is a new spring”.

Here, in my ten years in Bergamo, which are now almost over, I have tried to instil confidence in citizens and businesses, so as to move them to contribute - each one for their own skills and vocations - to the city’s growth. In Lorenzo Bosetti’s speech, the citizens’ contribution refers to a small action, the repainting of their homes, but I could offer much evidence that this contribution can actually extend to many areas of city life, from cultural animation to the organisation of welfare. And so for businesses, if in the public administration they find a solid reference point and a guide capable of indicating priorities and directions for the future development of the area. If Bergamo has grown in recent years, in the quality of life it makes possible for its citizens, in its attractiveness and reputation, much is owed to them, to the various expressions of civil society that have shared the challenge of public administration and aligned their respective interests with those of the entire city community. And I have no doubt that this was the case for Valdagno, in the ten ‘roaring years’ on which Lorenzo Bosetti stamped the seal of his great charisma.

part one: A man at the service of the company and the city

CHAPTER 1: DANTE SQUARE

There are a young man and his friend standing on a small terrace, on the top floor of the tallest apartment block overlooking Piazza Dante, in Valdagno. They are silent, their hands resting on the parapet, looking down into the twilight of an advanced spring, made premature by the modest angle of sky afforded to the valley. Incredulous, amid irregular waves of commotion, they follow the movements of a more nervous fringe of the crowd, trying to guess their intentions. Someone carries a rope stolen from a construction site not far away, others, climbing up, tie it around the neck of the statue of Gaetano Marzotto, the grandfather, as everyone calls him. Someone starts to pull but the rope breaks. A second one immediately arrives and this time the operation succeeds. The bronze falls, stiff and heavy, with a thud that is mixed with shouts and applause. The grandfather’s forehead and nose stop a few centimetres from the pavement, the sculpture wobbles a little and comes to a halt balanced between the two points of contact with the ground. On the one side the massive hexagonal pedestal, on the other a flap of the jacket with which the sculptor, Luciano Minguzzi, in 1955 wanted to portray the entrepreneur who had died 58 years earlier, in fact the real progenitor of the dynasty of industrialists who designed the city’s destiny in its essence.

It is 19 April 1968, the man at the window is Lorenzo Bosetti and he is not yet 30 years old. Born in the hinterland of Turin, since March of the previous year he has been a controller, i.e. a manager, of the fabrics division of Marzotto, a textile industry giant that has its historical headquarters just a few hundred metres from that square and that bases its current development on the entrepreneurial impulse that arose some 130 years earlier in the person celebrated by the now dented and downturned monument. What he is seeing, the young manager from Piemonte may not yet have fully understood. He still knows little about the history of Marzotto and Valdagno, although he began to inform himself long before deciding whether or not to accept the job offer he received while he had been in Monza for a couple of years. ‘A city that we didn’t like at all,’ recalls his wife, Marina Sereno. Married in 1962, the woman had followed Lorenzo to Brianza with Silvia, their recently born daughter, to go along with a promotion obtained at Philips, the Amsterdam-based multinational of electrical products of which they were both employees. He from Rivoli, she from Alpignano, towns absorbed in the indistinct industrial and urban progression of the post-war metropolis of Piedmont, Marina and Lorenzo had met working for a few months in the same department of the Dutch factory where they basically produced light bulbs. Philips at that time employed half the workforce by taking them from Alpignano and the surrounding area and the other half by hiring Turinese people who were not employed by Fiat. The osmosis between the capital and the now engulfed suburbs was frenetic and was already insufficient to sustain on its own, that is, without bringing in truckloads of arms and talkers from other latitudes, the bold industrial take-off of the boom years. When he joined Philips in 1958, Lorenzo Bosetti’s mother and sister were already workers in the same factory. He was the last to arrive there because he attended scientific high school for four years. However, a family background that had become difficult forced him to fend for himself and he graduated with a labourer’s overalls. He loads and unloads material from trucks until a fall causes the company to temporarily divert him to an office job. The physical injury is minor, he recovers quickly, but in the meantime he has had the opportunity to prove that he can be more useful from behind a desk. In fact, it is here that he not only gets to know Marina, but also becomes aware of what it means to do what he would later come to know as a controller. “We had the list of lamps to be manufactured and we had to compile the list of the necessary quantities of each component to send to the purchasing department,” Marina sums up. “It was hard work, requiring hours upon hours of precision and continuous analysis to be done as quickly as possible. That’s when we really started to work hard”. Under the banner of the Dutch house Bosetti grew up, made a name for himself, and in 1965 he was promoted to head of ‘consolidation and coordination of management control’ in Monza. A city in which the couple did not live with serenity. ‘It made you feel small, to be trampled on. An environment of superwomen and supermen,’ his wife still remembers, ‘so much so that even then it aspired to be a province detached from Milan. I was no longer there and neither was he. When the opportunity came for Marzotto we had no hesitation, we came to Valdagno immediately. In February 1967 we were here’. However, they found a moment that was not easy. The company was going through a climate of growing tension among the workers, on the one hand motivated by a season of restructuring in which an attempt was being made to reorganise the company and perceived by the workers as a consequence of the owners’ ill-considered choices, and on the other hand strengthened by the ideological wind of Sixty-Eight, which was beginning to vibrate in Europe and Italy and which was also taking root in the piedmont suburbs.

This, perhaps, is what the Turinese man on the terrace at his friend’s house in Piazza Dante is thinking. More than anything else he is probably surprised. He is not from here, but was born in a place not very different, he knows that people from the midlands do not have the temperament for revolutions and rather embody a physiognomy of silence, dignity and tenacity. it is a concept with a blurred border with that of resignation, one can even observe. It takes little to undermine it, if a few well-argued ideas held together in straightforward, simple words come along, as is happening.

It is not even worth considering that in 1968 Valdagno was still too distant from the nearest city, Vicenza, itself in the secondary orbit of a Veneto far from significant in terms of GDP and national political weight, which until then had never been the scene of major protests or popular unrest. The crowd that the young Bosetti now sees down in the square can be seen to be unaccustomed to extraordinary events, to conscious uprisings. It is an uncertain, disjointed body, a swarm amazed by its own enthusiasm and by the internal anger that realises it can shout without asking anyone’s permission. It must have been the truncheons of the carabinieri, up at the entrance to the factory, it must have been the overbearing thuds of the Celere, hastily dispatched from Padua. It must have been the union leaders who also went up to the valley to see how they could channel those phenomenal blazes that finally flared up in their thousands. The fact of the matter is that old Gaetano Marzotto no longer stands, tall and austere, at the centre of his secular altar. he has fallen badly, ungainly, and this seems to quieten the furore around him for a moment. Someone perhaps perceives the excess of desecration, the sense of a point of no return now crossed. But it is only a moment, the night will still be long and raw.

The Piedmontese in the balcony does not move a single muscle of his face. The idea that a quarter of a century later those people, their fathers and sons, would be the mayor, is further away than the ends of the universe.

CHAPTER 2: TRUCKS grazing walls