Twelfth Variation
Today’s corporate realities can be defined as “Occamistic organizations” that, amongst their key characteristics, have relativity, interconnection, metadisciplinarity and non-permanence.

The West identifies in pietas reciproca a solution that in the Orient corresponds to the compassion for every manifestation of life, even if that compassion is not combined there with practical attitude and activism (typically Western), that genius loci that has given life to the great Italian and European Renaissance, on both the artistic side and the entrepreneurial one. Even with this essential clarification, it can nevertheless be affirmed that humanism, in its historic genesis and revivals, finds its origins again, its moral continuity, starting from the project of a multilingual and multicultural polis, with differences mediated through policy, not leaving it to chaos, to luck, to artfulness and to the supremacy of some over the others.

Sense of individuality and guidance for the “good government” not of subjects but of active, loquacious persons, sometimes intemperate for the opposing interests to be reconciled (to bend, if necessary, to the predominant common interests), are just a couple of the components, certainly constitutive ones, of “human humanistics”. This demands however a recognized arbitrator (and not an arbitrary act), a perspective vision (and not a contingent choice), a cosmos of its own where the false conflict between scientific culture, political culture, speculative and artistic culture cease (and not a supermarket of offers), in the acceptance of the impossible renewal of variety in an all-incorporating knowledge, more than encyclopaedic, pansophic. The regained humanism in our everyday life can therefore be represented by the tendency to look for the range of “conventional truths” necessary to be able to reconsider ourselves humans under the most varied of circumstances. Relative truths that must open one to another, communicate, without losing their specificity in doing do and without arriving at a sort of “pre-arranged harmony”.

It is this knowledge, which feeds off many communicating “truths”, even in conflict when required, in the sense of Heraclitean conflict (“that which is opposed converges, and the most beautiful of plots is formed by divergents; and everything arises from comparison”), that is the key element for the functioning of the contemporary organization; not based on the maximum possible division of work, but on the opposite principle, namely the maximum possible compacting of work and on the reduction of the entities that are not strictly necessary. For this motive, the post-Taylorist organization can be also defined as an “Occamistic organization”. In fact, the famous phrase “entia non moltiplicanda sunt sine necessitate” (the entity must not be multiplied beyond what is strictly necessary) can be traced back to the philosopher William of Occam (c. 1280 ca.-1347). It is “Occam’s Razor” that the same historians of philosophy call the “principle of economy”.

If the Taylorist organization is characterized by a centrifugal motion, which tends to distinguish and multiply the specializations, in the Occamistic organization all managerial disciplines are subjected to a centripetal process, which is why they are attracted to each other. This does not mean that it is an organization of “amateurs”, in which everyone knows how to do everything, nor is it committed to a sole cult of great efficiency as an end in itself. Indeed, it is important to acquire the metadisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary abilities. Metadisciplinarity, opposed to every excessive and chaotic commingling, basically means that people are capable of doing two things: to relativize the contribution of their discipline with respect to other disciplines and to communicate with the internal and external operators of disciplines other that their own. Essentially, to be metadisciplinary means having the ability to make reference, directly or indirectly, to expertise other than that which one fully possesses. Now, if multidisciplinarity can be guaranteed by a team of specialists and interdisciplinarity by dialogue between specialists, metadisciplinarity rises from a glimpse born from a broad view of the world: of its premises, its states and its aims.

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