According to Olivetti, the enterprise must produce wealth, because without economic sustainability it cannot endure over time. But wealth is not its only purpose.
The enterprise must ask itself: what to produce for shareholders, for people, for the community, and for the territory.
This leads to a conception of the enterprise as a system for creating Plural Value, in which profit becomes the condition for continuity but not the definition of its purpose.
Olivetti's thinking can be represented through a series of dimensions, which represent a free synthesis rather than an official taxonomy:
The enterprise is a Community of People who are not merely a workforce to be coordinated toward production goals but, above all, bearers of intelligence, aspirations, culture, relationships, and creative ability. As a result, the organization cannot be designed solely through a vision of: structure → processes → control → incentives, but rather through a flow of: people → relationships → culture → meaning, the true guardian of the authentically humanistic dimension of the Olivettian enterprise.
This means recognizing: dignity, autonomy, capability, creativity, the need to learn, the need to belong, and the capacity to contribute to decisions.
The person thus becomes the subject of the enterprise, not the object of management.
The question, then, is not man or technology, but: how can technology be used to expand the possibilities of people and of the organization?
This principle takes on enormous relevance today, since Olivetti's industrial machine becomes, in the digital age, artificial intelligence. But with a decisive difference: a traditional machine mainly enhances physical or productive capacity, while AI can also enhance cognitive capacity, representing a far more profound discontinuity.
The enterprise contributes to building a community while at the same time drawing cultural, social, and professional resources from it, creating a circular relationship: Enterprise → Community → Enterprise.
The organization thrives when the ecosystem it belongs to thrives.
The library, the architecture, the publishing house, the design, and the training are therefore not elements foreign to the enterprise; rather, they are part of its competitive capacity.
The organization thus also becomes a learning environment.
A person can contribute meaningfully only when they have a certain degree of autonomy, which entails a corresponding assumption of responsibility: the greater the capacity to decide, the greater the responsibility for the value produced must become.
Like every avant-garde idea, the “Olivettian” experience was not free of real tensions: conflict with some shareholders, critical judgment from part of the historiography regarding the paternalism of the model, and the sale of the electronics division after Adriano Olivetti's death in 1960.
Acknowledging this makes it more “concrete” and less academic.