Careers

Entrepreneurs and talent: a parable for success

Entrepreneurial success comes from the courage to take risks, personal evolution and a concrete ethical vision

by Luca Brambilla*

20 March 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

The Parable of the Talents
Del Vecchio and Armani: passion becomes enterprise
Continue learning

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

The media abound with research and data on the shortage of specialised personnel: more than one in two companies denounce the difficulty of finding trained workers, particularly in the technical, engineering, IT and craft sectors. But Italia suffers even more from a lack of entrepreneurs. Not just any entrepreneurs, but those who are willing to get involved and work on themselves in order to fully understand their talents and, secondly, to make them bear fruit.

Ours is a country with a high rate of entrepreneurship, with over 4.8 million entrepreneurs (Istat, 2021). 78.9 per cent of businesses are micro (3 to 9 employees), often born from local or family entrepreneurial choices and not always aligned with the founder's personal talent and passion. In famous cases, however, the founder's idea and ability grew with the company until it became a multinational.

The Parable of the Talents

There is a 'high' model for entrepreneurs that we need: in the most beautiful and noble meaning of the term, the entrepreneur is the one who works by paraphrasing the parable of the talents in the 'Gospel according to Matthew' (25:14-30).

A man, before setting out on a long journey, entrusts goods to three servants: five talents to the first, two to the second and one to the third. The first two invest them and double what they receive; the third, for fear of losing everything, hides the talent underground. On their return, the master praises and rewards the first two for their resourcefulness, while rebuking the third for being too cautious, taking away what he had.

The parable has been read as an invitation to fidelity while waiting for Christ or adherence to his Word. But it can also be interpreted in a contemporary key and applied to the business world: it is not enough to keep what you have, you have to take the risk of using it and making it grow, because inertia, dictated by fear, leads to the loss of opportunities.

Del Vecchio and Armani: passion becomes enterprise

Two great entrepreneurs like Leonardo Del Vecchio and Giorgio Armani certainly have this lesson well in mind. Visionaries, they followed their talent, made it blossom and generated value for themselves, employees, customers and the environment.

Leonardo Del Vecchio, the founder of Luxottica who died in 2022, was born in 1935 in Milan in poverty. Orphaned by his father at birth, he was entrusted by his mother to the Martinitt boarding school at the age of 7. Del Vecchio started working at a very young age as an apprentice. As an entrepreneur, his great intuition was to transform glasses from a simple device to correct eyesight to a fashion accessory. His talent and vision were forged together with his work ethic: even in recent years, despite his enormous market success, the Milanese entrepreneur has maintained a practical, 'man of doing' approach, with great attention to personnel.

The story of Giorgio Armani shows us instead how talent does not always manifest itself in a linear or precocious way. Armani was not born a fashion designer: he studied medicine, then worked as a window-dresser and buyer at La Rinascente in Milan. When he decides to start his own business, he is no longer very young and does not have much capital. What he does have is a clear vision: to lighten the rigid structure of formal clothing and propose an essential and modern elegance. In 1975, at the age of 41, he founded Giorgio Armani S.p.A. and over time built up an internationally recognised brand.

The decisive point, again, is the work on oneself. Armani had the courage to follow his talent even when it was no longer obvious. He was able to organise creative ability and turn it into an entrepreneurial system.

Del Vecchio and Armani have made Italia great in the world: the hope is that they will soon be joined by other giants who know how to combine product brilliance with a real ethical vision, not simply announced.

Continue learning

In short, the real mistake, and the gospel talents tell us this, is not to lose but not to try. Many entrepreneurs fail because they stop evolving. This means continuing to learn, choosing better collaborators than oneself in certain areas, changing one's mind but remaining true to one's mission.

The entrepreneur that Italy lacks is precisely the one who not only does not hide his talent underground, but who knows how to exploit it: he starts from the much (or the little) he has and enhances it in a 'parable' of success.

*Director Strategic Communication Academy