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Home > Spotlight
A winning strategy - an interview with Franco Bernabé:
Chairman and majority stakeholder in the FB Group, Franco Bernabé sets out his recipe for success as a manager and an entrepreneur and stresses the need to combine social and environmental aspects in a positive manner
 Roma - (Adnkronos Multimedia) - The secret of success for a manager or an entrepreneur? Keep looking ahead with an eye to the medium and long term. Be aware of the great opportunities for success; grasp day-to-day possibilities but always within the framework of a strategic scenario. This is the recipe which readily emerges when looking at the professional and managerial career path of a man like Franco Bernabé, who has been involved with economic and company strategies for at least three decades, not shut away in planning and control offices or in university institutes but always down on the field, both as manager and entrepreneur.
A very full curriculum, which has brought him from Turin University, where he was a Professor in Economic Politics, right up to the present, where he is now Vice President of Rothshild Europe, one of the most important international investment banks. He has also been the Head of Economic Studies at Fiat, afterwards moving on to ENI, firstly as assistant to the President and Director for Development, and subsequently Managing Director for six years from 1992 to 1998. Franco Bernabé was the head of Telecom Italia until 1999; in 2000 he founded the FB Group, and is now their Chairman and majority shareholder. The Group represents a company fully able to combine technology with the environment, information and communication technology and renewable energies.
In what way have conditions changed now as far as a company's success is concerned? At one time all that was necessary was to present sound financial statements. Is that still true today?
"Sound financial statements are no longer enough. A different relationship is needed with regard to markets and the social fabric where activities take place. We need only to look at ENI: through a complex restructuring process, a vast and rambling group of companies under State control was transformed into one of the most dynamic public oil companies in the world. It was not an easy process, nor was it straightforward, but the challenge was won, also thanks to having the courage to look ahead beyond the present, and to take a long-term perspective.
Looking inside Franco Bernabé we find an entrepreneur - President of the FB Group, a manager of financial strategies, as Vice President of Rothshild Europe, and a manager of new technologies as Vice President of H3G, the telephone company. How do you reconcile these roles?
"When a company expands, you need to have the courage to find a shareholder willing to support development. I did this with Andala (today H3G), which was bought by Hutchinson Whampoa and where I have maintained a managerial role as Vice President. I also did the same with the advisory activities of Franco Bernabé & Co., joining up with Rothshild, where I took on a management role".
But is having a strategy and technologies enough?
"I believe that today other factors need to be combined in a positive manner. For example, aspects of a social nature and those relating to the environment. This is a path requiring a new priority scale, a new capacity to manage the variables of sustainability and a new context which can strengthen and concretize the incentives that only very few people nowadays seem able to take up. An obstacle to the creation of a company in a sustainable manner would appear to be the imperative for efficiency in a context of global competition, where, thanks to easy access to technology, the efficiency of transport networks and the rapidity of communication systems, professionals in the field find themselves mainly in competition at the level of cost reduction. Competition in all fields means that companies are paying almost fanatical attention to aspects that influence short-term earnings, and therefore represent a strong drive towards centralisation and the ceding to third parties of less important transformation phases. So all of this has to be taken into consideration, while there is a tendency to relegate the key elements of competitiveness to a secondary level over the long term. Occupying an important place here are topics of sustainability. However, becoming ever more apparent is the way in which these considerations form the essential building blocks needed to lend stability to a growth which is otherwise fragile and unbalanced precisely because of those factors, such as a reduction in production costs, which can no longer represent an area of success for companies in the industrialised world".
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