Why Harari, and why now
Over the past few weeks I have read and reread Yuval Noah Harari’s four books: Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and Nexus. I didn’t do it to collect quotations. I wanted to see whether ideas on such a large scale had anything to say about my everyday work.
The answer is yes, and more concretely than I expected. Harari writes about empires, religions and algorithms. I work with doors and walls, with training, with university classrooms. And yet, page after page, I kept finding questions I ask myself every week with my colleagues and my students.
In this article I try to set out the ideas that stayed with me and what they are changing in my ventures.
Three ideas I take away
The stories we share hold people together. In Sapiens, Harari argues that our real advantage as a species is our ability to believe together in things that do not exist in nature: money, nations, companies. They are not lies. They are agreements that work as long as enough of us believe in them. Before it is a factory, a company is a story that colleagues and clients decide to share.
Information connects; it does not only tell the truth. In Nexus, Harari takes apart the naive idea that more information automatically leads to more truth. A simple, flattering story travels faster than a complex fact. That is why the organisations that last are the ones able to notice their own mistakes and correct them, without claiming to be infallible.
The right question is “what do we want to want?” Sapiens ends with it. We have enormous power over the world and over ourselves, but we don’t really know what to do with it. In Homo Deus and 21 Lessons the question becomes urgent: if we don’t decide what to desire, someone else, or some algorithm, will decide for us.
What changes in my work
At LINVISIBILE: a story the facts must confirm. We tried to say in one sentence who we are: LINVISIBILE designs silence; we take away so that space can speak. Harari reminded me that a sentence like that brings people together only if each of them finds it in their own work. The salesperson who doesn’t promise impossible lead times, the logistics team that leaves the site in order, the production team working to the millimetre. If the facts contradict it, the story deflates. That is why our monthly non-conformity meeting is not bureaucracy: it is how we correct ourselves, and it is the most serious part of our narrative.
With architects: trust as credit. When an architect specifies us, they lend us their reputation in front of their client. Every successful project pays back part of that loan. This leads to some concrete choices: asking for their feedback at the end of each job, not inflating promises, giving visibility to their projects. The co-development of the Zefiro, Maestrale and Velea systems with Camilla Bellini is my favourite example: when you build together, “we” stops being a slogan.
In training: learning to know ourselves. With JTC, through consulting for companies and the programmes of JTC School, I have worked for years on a simple idea: organisations change when people change. Harari says that the 21st century will need less information and more ability to think critically, communicate, collaborate and reinvent ourselves. That is what we try to do in the classroom. I would add something I used to take for granted: teaching people to recognise when someone, or something, is trying to steer their choices.
At university: fewer answers, better questions. In the courses and MBA programmes where I teach, I meet managers who will have to decide in a world where algorithms make more and more of the decisions. I don’t think my job is to give them final answers. I think it is to train Harari’s question: what do we really want, as people and as organisations?
At Star Plast Engineering: the factory as a network. In Arad, Romania, we design moulds and do plastic injection moulding. I came to it through Francesco Rigo, first my student, then a JTC client, then a friend and a partner, together with Pierpaolo Carteri. A chain of trust built over the years, just like the networks Harari writes about. As Managing Partner I look after the numbers, the cash flow and the investment choices of a company we chose to relaunch. This is where Harari’s ideas become most tangible. We work inside what he calls a single global civilisation: the same standards, the same certifications, clients and suppliers in several countries. And every day we see automation changing work on the shop floor. His lesson, to protect people rather than individual jobs, means for us investing in the skills of those who work with us. Our quality systems are our self-correcting mechanism: measure, admit the mistake, improve.
At 23 O: the home as a story. With Fulvio Lanari I founded 23 O to handle high-end private residential projects, turnkey: from concept to materials, from styling to the building site. For us a home is a story made of material, light and proportion. Harari might say that every successful home is a small shared fiction: it works when the people who live in it recognise themselves in it. Our job is to listen to what the client really wants, which is often different from what they ask for at the start.
At Damaranto: beauty as a shared experience. Damaranto was born from my meeting with Camilla Bellini in 2016, through LINVISIBILE itself. It weaves together design, art and storytelling to understand how beauty takes shape through materials, ideas and people. Here Harari’s lesson is almost literal: beauty lies not only in objects but in the stories we build around them together. And the collaborations between Damaranto and LINVISIBILE show that two ventures that support each other tell a stronger story than either could alone.
The question I carry with me
Harari offers no recipes, and I don’t always agree with his generalisations. But he has the merit of shifting the point of view. He made me see that a company, a classroom or a design project works when people share a story, and stays standing only if that story holds up against the facts.
The question I carry with me is his: what do we want to want? It applies to LINVISIBILE, to those who train people, to those who teach. And before that it applies to each of us, because that is where everything else begins.