The importance of education and training for Italy’s leaders

The debate focused on the ideal approach for providing Italy’s managers with a training process that encourages personal maturity, pushing students to abandon an enduring adolescent phase. In an era of exponential fragmentation of knowledge, the leaders of the future will need new methodologies for understanding, and a solid sense of the necessity of continuing education. First, we need to recover the virtuous cycle of training-transmission-training and make the principle of “returning to school” part of our mindset. We need to go beyond the substandard educational pedantry that has erased hierarchy and a sense of limits for far too many years. Second, schools need to be invested once again with authoritativeness and dignity: authority, social prestige and better economic conditions should be guaranteed our teachers. The structure of universities also needs to be reevaluated in terms of quality and excellence, allocating greater funds on the basis of results. Moreover, we should hope for greater balance between study of the humanities and the sciences, as well as an educational process that privileges meritocracy and develops the capacity for critical thought – an essential element for managing complex companies. All this is also needed to bring back the ethics of responsibility, something should infuse the new management classes: the leaders of the future should be held accountable for the work they do, and they need to accept that.