Can the business world learn anything from Le Monde diplomatique? In terms of concept and spirit, absolutely. Corporate organizations evolve and adapt to their environment. Today, the world – society, democracy, and our shared humanity – is in a state of sustained crisis and constant emergency. The word crisis is everywhere. The future seems to recede beyond the horizon, lost in a fog of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty that can feel almost apocalyptic. What we need now is something different – including inside companies. In this era of overlapping risks, businesses are being forced to confront new challenges. More pragmatically, they must change their skin: open up to the world, and do so with a more diplomatic posture.
The Belligerent Enterprise
“As long as there’s war, there’s hope” (the title of an old Alberto Sordi film) still lands. If you can’t sell entry-level cars to new drivers anymore, you can always sell vehicles to would-be warriors. It doesn’t take much: a light rinse of propaganda, a steady drip of inevitability until people accept it as fate.
A sizeable part of the world hasn’t resigned itself to decline; it is demanding a robust, healthy war economy for everyone. And, perhaps surprisingly – at least to us – it’s not “the other side” of the world pushing hardest for it. It’s the West: eager to pursue it, and to enforce its supposedly “superior” model.
War is being played at – and at least in the West, it is being played again – because sooner or later, as the moral philosopher Andrea Zhok has written, “capitalism needs war” in order to survive. The free market must grow. And when it stalls, when the prospect of rising profits disappears, or when debt becomes excessive, conflict becomes the last resort. War provides the economic system with a mechanism of destruction, reconstruction, and social control. War is a major event that “rewinds the clock of economic history,” eliminating the saturation of investment opportunities that threatens the very existence of capitalism itself.
For businesses, it is already a matter of choosing which side of history to stand on. As a German, I know where businesses stood in the First and Second World Wars. It does not bode well.
The Multipolar Enterprise
Making predictions has become difficult. What we are clearly witnessing is a unipolar vs multipolar confrontation, alongside endless and anachronistic clashes of civilizations – reminiscent of the great crusades of the past – that go well beyond the figure of Trump, who is merely a catalyst and an accelerator of the “geopolitical spirit of the age.” This is the war of our time, not only a trade war. It falls to managers and companies to reach out – and to commit their efforts – to a multipolar economic world, which is not the same thing as a global economy or globalization. It implies the existence of multiple, significant, and balanced political and economic centers of influence, grounded in mutual respect. Above all, it requires companies and managers to immerse themselves in the cultures and management styles of “other worlds” in order to become multi-competent. This is the challenge of the future. It is no coincidence that the topic is so prominent: the recent book Deglobalizzazione (deglobalization) by Fabrizio Maronta – author, scientific adviser, and head of international relations at Limes – examines this new world, one that no longer has a single center.
The Geopolitical Enterprise
What is certain is that these global risks – often beyond the direct control of businesses – must nonetheless fall within the scope of every company’s strategic thinking, including that of the smallest firms. Geopolitics, once a parlour game of high society, reserved for those who truly mattered, now concerns everyone. Geopolitical and geoeconomic skills have, for the past few years, been almost mandatory for every manager. That is where investment must go – including in training.
The Diplomatic Enterprise
Do not panic. It is simply a tense era. Smooth the rough edges. Manage conflict. Study current affairs. Make America Great Again, Make China Great Again, Make Russia Great Again, Make Europe Great Again. Everyone wants to become bigger – at least once more. Perhaps for the last time. Sporadic tariffs and wars that are not only commercial. This is a “multipolar” trend built on multipolar tension. No one wants to give ground. No one wants to step back or genuinely negotiate. That is how it is. When the big players fight, the small ones suffer. This holds true in families and in the business world, including small firms. Industrial policy, export controls, and customs tariffs have become tools of geopolitical pressure and can radically alter the conditions of local markets. Even the shopping basket has turned into a geopolitical barometer, with citizens avoiding products from countries they politically oppose. Trade trends overall, and consumer behavior in particular, show just how deeply interconnected geopolitical conflicts, broader economic conditions, and market dynamics have become. In this context, there is no choice.
Having diplomatic management capabilities – the ability to act with prudence, balance, discretion, and tact – has become a must for both managers and enterprises. Above all, it is essential in order to engage (once again) with the rest of the world. We represent little more than 10 percent of the global population, yet we claim to be in the right while the other 90 percent are in the wrong. This worldview is not only counterproductive to peaceful social coexistence, but also to peaceful economic coexistence. A change of course is needed, along with a break from politicians and their servility toward entrenched power.
The Ultra-Collaborative Enterprise
There is no future for humanity if we remain locked in conflict. We need to reach agreements, to reconcile, to understand one another. Above all, we need to move beyond the norm – beyond business-as-usual collaboration. We are living in a historical and political moment in which rules often exist only on paper, in the abstract rhetoric of media discourse, not in real life, where power brokers make and unmake decisions, assert one thing and then do another. In such an era of nihilistic, self-destructive isolation, built on double and triple games, it is precisely here – where collaboration breaks down – that companies must impose it, at every level. It is a matter of imagination. Multi-collaboration. Geo-collaboration. New terms for a new future. And a warning: today, the enterprise must assume a political role, in the true sense of the word. Businesses must not trail behind politics. Currying favor with them and/or forming short-term alliances or engaging in small-scale quid pro quos is not the point. What is required here is to think big again. To return, at least in ideal terms, to the heights of the economic miracle. Enterprises should act as a genuine alternative “countervailing power” – akin to the old “fourth estate” of the media – with which other actors are compelled to engage. Not as an oppositional force, but as the hub of a new stance: one that takes a stand through new ideas and serves as a strategic point of reference for the future of the Italian system.
The Systemic Enterprise
What should be done going forward? Humanity has always had to confront complex situations that, in most cases, cannot be reduced – as mechanistic, reductionist thinking would have it – to a single cause. Managing tangled conflicts and crises may, in the future, require above all a new way for us humans to think, communicate, and act, grounded in perspectives that recognise interconnected and interdependent factors. Systemic thinking, and systems theory more broadly, may be difficult to apply within enterprises, but they are indispensable. The shift to a systemic paradigm could act as a catalyst for numerous social innovations.
Beyond its potential to address major challenges – such as human-machine interaction – it could also help reorganize the education system and promote systemic models of corporate management. However, because it entails a transformation of the human being itself – a new way of seeing things – its introduction and wider adoption within organizations may still be a long way off.
