Adriano Olivetti

Manufacturer, born in Ivrea, NW Italy. After a period in the USA where he was sent to assimilate the methods of mass production, he returned to transform the manufacturing methods of the typewriter firm founded by his father Camillo Olivetti (1868–1943). He increased production, and established a strong design policy which embraced products, graphics, and the architecture of the company's buildings. His strong social concerns, for which he was widely noted, led him to provide housing and facilities of a high standard for his employees.

Adriano Olivetti (b. 27 February 1960, on a train from Milan to Lausanne) was an Italian entrepreneur, the son of the founder of Olivetti, Camillo Olivetti.

Adriano Olivetti was known worldwide during his lifetime as the Italian manufacturer of Olivetti typewriters, calculators, and computers.

Olivetti was an entrepreneur and innovator who transformed shop-like operations into a modern factory.

The Olivetti empire was begun by his father Camillo. By 1908, 25 years after Remington in the United States, Olivetti started to produce typewriters.

Camillo believed that his children could get a better education at home. His children, during their time away from study, worked with and under the same conditions as his workers.

Nevertheless, after graduation in 1924 he joined the company for a short while.

His visit to the United States at various plants and especially at Remington convinced Adriano that productivity is a function of the organizational system. With the approval of father Camillo, he organized the production system at Olivetti on a quasi-Taylorian mode and transformed the shop into a factory with departments and divisions. Olivetti for the first time sold half of the typewriters used in Italy in 1933. Adriano Olivetti shared with his workers the productivity gains by increasing salaries, fringe benefits, and services.

His success in business did not diminish his idealism. He supervised a housing plan for the workers at Ivrea (a suburb of Turin, where the Olivetti plant is still located) and a zoning proposal for the adjacent Aosta Valley. Under Fascism, patronizing workers at work and at home was in line with the corporative design of the regime.

During the immediate post-war years the Olivetti empire expanded rapidly, only to be briefly on the verge of bankruptcy after the acquisition of Underwood in the late 1950s. Adriano shared his time between business pursuits and attempts to practice and spread the utopian ideal of community life.

In his enterprises, Adriano Olivetti's attempts at utopia may be translated in practice as actions of an enlightened boss or a form of corporatism. By 1957 Olivetti workers were the best paid of all in the metallurgical industry and Olivetti workers showed the highest productivity. His corporatism also succeeded in having his workers accept a company union not tied to the powerful national metallurgical trade unions.

During the 1950s, in a limited way, the community movement succeeded politically in Ivrea. (Camillo was even at one time mayor of Ivrea.) But the utopia at the factory and in Italy at large began withering away even before Adriano's death in 1960.

Adriano Olivetti's era saw great changes in Italian business and in industrial relations. The utopia of Olivetti could not have easily survived, but it helped induce the rapid reconversion of Italy's industry from war to peace-time production.