Management Secrets of the Agnellis
Lapo, making the brand trendy again
The, ah, Italian affairs “mavens” out there may recall that some time back a young but fairly senior member of the Agnelli clan – the nominal owners of Fiat – encountered a cocaine-based health problem while passing the evening with a couple of professional transvestites and had to be rushed to the hospital.
It was a mark of how little the family now matters in Italy that this became big news. For more than a couple of days the “notte brava” of young Mr. Lapo Elkann (the family is even running short of people named Agnelli) was above the fold stuff.
Elkann was sent off to heal himself on a beach in Florida and to stay out of the way for a while. He is now apparently fine, which is a good thing, because he is a pleasant and well-intentioned fellow. “Patrizia”, the nom de guerre of the brazilian working-person who saved him deserves a medal. She and her colleague could have as easily dumped him on a curb as sought the help he needed. That certainly would have been the safer alternative.
However that is, the whole thing excited some comment, especially since Elkann had been painted as a key Fiat executive, charged with the specific mission of making the company “trendy” again. Since trying to pretend Fiat is fundamentally all right in spite of appearances – and in spite of its accounts – is nearly a national patriotic mission here, most such comment was very supportive.
The most exhilarating explanation for the episode was that given to the Corriere della Sera by Mr. Oddone Camerana, a nobly-born relative of the family, an Elkann uncle and sometime Fiat executive himself. He took the view that the whole thing should be seen as a form of management training. Here is how the Corriere handled his comments:
The training mechanism for the young Agnellis, Camerana says, has always consisted of a mixture of sport and women. “Sport, particularly skiing and sailing, is considered important for building the body and for building character… a foundation on which to form a managerial culture.”
“But the training with women is ‘importantissimo’ too, and not in the banal and negative sense. Learning to seduce them, to leave them and then take them back without being conditioned by them was a school for human relations in the family code, a way of learning how to live in the world. Then, at the university, you could study law or engineering, but this was secondary.”
Nothing then so vulgar as just “sowing wild oats,” though Camerana does take the trouble to point out that, “The ‘Avvocato’ (Gianni Agnelli, Lapo’s grandfather and recently deceased family patriarch) had his flings with actresses. But he married a princess.”
Neither the Corriere nor Mr. Camerana bend to remember that no women as such were actually involved in the episode involving the young Elkann, but then again his name barely appears in the piece.
At any rate, while other scions of industrial dynasties have been tied up with drab stuff involving MBAs and possibly even spreadsheets, the innovative Agnelli approach appears to have been keyed on getting loaded and getting laid. How has this worked out in practice?
Not terribly well, sad to say. Ever since the founding Giovanni Agnelli – not a coke and trans kind of guy at all, by most reports – left this world in 1945, there has been a single, bright thread running through Fiat management history. The company gets into trouble and a heavy-hitting professional manager is called in to straighten it out. When that’s done, the family – when it can, at least – gets into a “who does he think he is, he’s just the help” snit and tosses him out. They put in one of their own, the scion screws up and the whole cycle starts over.
Probably not this time though. As mentioned, there is now a significant shortage of viable Agnelli offspring, and in any case the family is no longer in a position to do much of anything over the dead bodies of its creditor banks.
Kind of a shame, really. Though in theory the ant was the good guy and the grasshopper the loser in Aesop’s famous fable, any right-thinking person would likely much prefer to have a beer with the second of the two.