I did not know Adriano Olivetti but, when in the spring of 1978 I took the position of reference shareholder, Vice President and CEO of Olivetti, I" breathed "it in my office, in the factories and in the managers who were then working in Olivetti and they had known him. Adriano was a presence, more than a memory or a nostalgia...

(- Carlo De Benedetti -)

A thousand miles away from the feverish voracity of accumulation, from the ignorant adventurousness of gambling... which still infect so many entrepreneurs, we can say that Adriano Olivetti managed to lead the company and management from the industrial world to the post-industrial world.

Just as, in the same years, Freud and Jung brought traditional psychology to psychoanalysis, Picasso brought Piero della Francesca's painting towards Cubism, Einstein brought Newton's physics to relativity, Stravinsky brought romantic music to 'atonality, Joyce brought the nineteenth-century novel to the open work.