Twenty years after the death of Gianni Agnelli his personality shows no signs of fading. And his actions continue to be the subject of conflicting evaluations. The effect of which smacks more of current events than history. In particular, the difficulty of managing characters with strong personalities but with opposite vocations has sometimes turned into a trap that has ended up imprisoning him. The contrast between Vittorio Ghidella and Cesare Romiti is already in the air well before that December 18, 1987 when the lawyer Agnelli in the usual year-end meeting in Marentino, Fiat training center 20 km from Turin, decides to designate his brother Umberto to his succession and Vittorio Ghidella to that by Cesare Romiti. Without imagining that that announcement would have started an unsolvable conflict at the top. A stalemate that Gianni Agnelli decides to resolve by resorting to two founding elements of his character: intransigence and intolerance. At Fiat he sentences, he commands only one at a time. And the choice falls on Cesare Romiti. In reality, history up until then seemed to testify to the opposite.
It’s systematic dualism, based on the concept of “divide and conquer”, to characterize the management strategy of the property. With the result that systematic invasions of the field spread from top management to the entire hierarchical scale. In the case of the relationship between Ghidella and Romiti, the dispute formally originated from two distinct visions of the company’s future: self-centered for the former, diversified for the latter, which essentially translate into a clash on the investment plan. The situation is complicated by the fact that this dualism is of a “secondary” nature and derives from the “primary” one which irreparably divides Gianni and Umberto. The state of awe of the younger brother prevents direct clashes. The confrontation takes place through a third party in a war in which the sacrifice of the combatants is widely expected and completely negligible. And yet, with the exception of the poorly tolerated control in terms of investments, Romiti keeps well away from the car, even at the cost of giving his opponent the advantage of image that derives from “dealing” with a product with such a large hold on the market. public.
For Romiti, who represents the positions of the lawyer Agnelli, Fiat it must draw its profits from essentially financial activities and all available resources must be devoted to these. According to this view it is a useless waste to reinvest in the car. Competitiveness on the market can be obtained more advantageously by containing list prices and making do with reduced or even negative contribution margins which would have been compensated in any case by profits from finance. For Vittorio Ghidella, on the contrary, the car is at the center of the enterprise, a cruel, voracious, fickle and inconstant divinity to which all available resources must be sacrificed to prevent it from opening the gates of a hell that no finance and no financier would have been able to close. Many years after the collapse of the stock markets and the spread of the crisis to an auto industry that has sold its soul to finance, they would have taken it upon themselves to indicate without a shadow of a doubt which of the two positions was the more forward-looking.
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