Companies deal daily with models and interpretive philosophies about what and how a working environmentshould be.

The fundamental question underlying these reflections is disarmingly simple: 

What is the purpose of the enterprise?

Yet, despite this, the answer is extremely complex, multifaceted, and never definitive. 

If the enterprise were merely a mechanism designed to maximize profit, then efficiency, control, productivityand capital might be enough to describe it.

But this is almost never the case, and among the first to raise the question was Adriano Olivetti (around the 1950s), who saw the enterprise as part of an ecosystem (To the Workers or City of Man):

“the enterprise is an economic organism embedded within a human community”

Of course, every enterprise must be efficient and competitive, but at the same time it must contribute to the development of people, of culture and of the territory, while still keeping profit central — though profit alone does not exhaust the meaning of entrepreneurial activity.

From this thinking emerges a noble definition of Entrepreneur, different from that of the owner or the manager: 

the entrepreneur is the one who builds the conditions that allow an enterprise to generate economic and human value over time.

Moving now to the present, one might ask:

If the “Olivettian enterprise” was a community of people capable of generating value, what does the enterprise become when it confronts complex domains and different intelligences steadily influence its capacity to understand, decide, and act?

Intelligent Business Agility (IBA) attempts to give an imperfect answer to this question, proposing an evolution toward the Value-Oriented Organization.