Aristotelian Flourishing for a Virtuous Business Vision: The Philosophical Wisdom as a Strategic Tool for an Effective Change in the Management

The authors, who combine academic study with business experience, start their reflection from the question: what makes a company truly innovative today? The contribution identifies the decisive turning point in reconnecting business and managerial practices to ethical action, which is the specific object of philosophy, thus following the philosophical tradition. The assay will show, through theoretical and practical evidence, the renewed role that philosophy assumes within corporate dynamics and in the global socio-economic context, through today’s human-centered corporate turning point. In particular, reference will be made to the Aristotelian Ethics, in the elaboration of the Nicomachean Ethics, as a paradigmatic starting point for any ethical reflection that still wants to be valid today. The figure of the practical philosopher emerges in the new corporate vision. It is recognizing the central importance of the human being, in entrepreneurial management and in business, which calls upon the expert par excellence of humanity, or the (practical) philosopher, to make his contribution, in an interdisciplinary and multidimensional logic that enhances specificities. Thus, the philosophical consultant does not offer philosophical and dusty contents by taking the chair or “pre-packaged” theories, but offers philosophical skills, connected to conceptual analysis, deduction and phenomenological description, through which he recomposes the fragmentation within a continuum sense, restructuring and expanding the boundaries of the company itself. It is the realization of such a perspective that redefines the value of the company and its real impact on the economy and society. On the other hand, this is the era of permanent revolution, in which the most significant challenge is precisely the management of complexity, unpredictability, paradox. A new mission that only (practical) wisdom can bring to fruition. In the contemporary scenario, which is revealed in continuous evolution, the authors with this contribution intend to outline the importance of a change management with a philosophical vocation. Change Management is necessary to “invent” the future, making possible what is not yet, especially in this historical period in which the coronavirus is terrorizing the world, giving rise to phenomena of collective fear, alarmism, paralysis. The crisis we are experiencing is not only business-economic but systemic, as it affects the entire socio-cultural-economic fabric. In this current and simultaneous context, the whole country system, government, institutions, companies and non-profit organizations must also face not only the already raging crisis, but must prepare for significant changes in all their areas. The priority in this situation is to improve skills and qualities. It is in this change, which is preparing to be of epochal significance, that the contribution of the specific skills of Change Management can therefore prove to be fundamental, as the contribution wants to elaborate and describe. The time has therefore come to move from rationality to wisdom. But to grasp it, a renewed operational/practical wisdom is needed more than ever, which virtuously holds together the individual and the community, the economy and the humanity: philosophical phrònesis applied to the management of change is indispensable.