Missionary Over Mercenary Entrepreneur

“Michele Ferrero divides entrepreneurs into two categories: missionaries and mercenaries. The former, explains Arduino Borgogno, are characterized by a strong and primary love for the product-business and for the man before the factory ("love what you do, make it grow and be generous and supportive towards those who help you make it grow, don't do it just for the business"). In this perspective, wary of economic neoliberalism, his generosity towards employees fits in: generosity of daily small gestures ("one day he was wearing one of his nicest coats and a worker complimented him. He took it off and gave it to him," recalls Francesco Paolo Fulci) but which, as legal advisor Giulio Coppi recounts, could even extend to pondering the transfer of company stakes: "One day Mr. Michele calls me and asks me to study a solution to give something extra to longer-serving employees, those with over twenty-five years, to make them feel his gratitude for what they had done and were doing for the group. He specified: 'I want to give one company share to every employee'. At that time, the potential beneficiaries were more than four thousand. I committed to studying the operation which turned out to be complex and not feasible because of the financial architecture, all family-based. And therefore with great disappointment of Mr. Ferrero, who was hardly persuaded to abandon an idea once he had it, I explained that it was impossible to proceed without risking the entire corporate structure. It didn’t happen, Michele set aside his plan with much pain."”

“Challenging because the man made discretion a rule (“dis lu a niun”, don’t tell anyone, was one of his favorite expressions); exciting because it allowed to shed light on the entrepreneurial humanism of the protagonist of a family business that has withstood the great crisis, that creates wealth with honor and distributes it fairly; that aims at profit not with the ruthless approach of predatory and rapacious capitalism, but according to the logic, to use his own words, that “doing good for oneself is also good for others”.”