The crisis in manufacturing, the European dilemma and Italian excellence
Lorenzo Mariani. Leonardo’s chief executive talks about his roots in Rome’s scientific and industrial middle class and outlines the future of the security industry against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty
‘Today, we are being shaped in a traumatic and violent way by the speed of change. In the 1990s, when I started at Finmeccanica, the phenomena that caused total upheavals in industrial systems occurred every ten years. Then, through the combined influence of technology, manufacturing and geopolitics, this interval fell to six years. This initial dramatic shortening of the major cycles held true until 2019. Now it has halved. In these difficult times, everything changes every three years.”
Lorenzo Mariani is the chief executive of Leonardo. We are in the guest quarters on Piazza Monte Grappa, on the top floor. Through the windows, you can see St Peter’s Basilica and the Altar of the Fatherland, the flags of the Quirinale and the Pincio. Before we start eating, Mariani outlines the particular psychological and emotional state of a company director and the specific strategic and operational profile of every modern business: ‘It is not a situation that terrifies or overwhelms. But there is certainly an awareness that this represents a new and radical challenge for those leading large technology and manufacturing conglomerates. It has never happened before. In every industrial sector, artificial intelligence is leading to shorter design and production lead times and a reduction in capex – the fixed capital expenditure that once represented a very high barrier in every sector. Today’s landscape is characterised by shorter lead times, lower capital expenditure and the removal of barriers to entry.”
Mariani, an engineer, represents the low point – and the new beginning – of an Italian industrial history which, over the long term, is directly part of the flow of the future. He is a senior executive at Leonardo-Finmeccanica who has been entirely ‘shaped’ by the history of this manufacturing company, which plays a central role in Italy’s techno-industrial balance and dynamics. He joined as a young man, shortly after completing his studies. He has risen through the ranks entirely within the company, working across research and production, sales and markets, technology and geopolitics. Mariani says: ‘The general context for the Old Continent is one of a decline in manufacturing. For over half a century, the automotive sector has formed the backbone of the industrial system. The crisis in the Western car industry is having a significant impact across the whole of Europe. At Leonardo, we are at the forefront of many international technological frontiers. And, thanks to our manufacturing facilities and our national supply networks, we are a solid backbone and an active source of resilience for Italia as a nation of factories.”
For starters, both are served a seafood salad. Mariani’s background is Roman, though not in the sense of the politics and bureaucracy that characterise the capital, but in the sense of the business culture – often overlooked and overshadowed by the first two – which has existed in Rome ever since the 1930s, when it became the linchpin of the public industry created by Alberto Beneduce’s IRI and which coalesced around Finmeccanica in the post-World War II period.
Mariani – born and brought up in the Trieste neighbourhood, with a degree in engineering from the University of Rome 1 – belongs, by family background, to a particular – and rare – type of Roman middle class: the scientific professional middle class, another hidden and influential minority within Roman society which, in physics for example, has produced figures ranging from the young men of Via Panisperna to Giorgio Parisi. In Lorenzo’s family, his mother Concetta, a graduate in pharmacy, and his father Aurelio, a chemist, both worked at the National Institute of Health. ‘My father,’ recalls Mariani, ‘had very close research ties with French, Swedish and German scientists.’ This was something of a rarity in Rome, where the middle class usually has a legal and administrative background and vocation. “My family,” he explains, “has always had a multifaceted outlook. Alongside the scientific and technological aspects, there is also a humanistic and artistic dimension. My paternal grandfather, Lucio, was a painter and an archaeologist, and director of the Museum of the Baths. He took part in the excavations at Leptis Magna in the Libyan desert, where the Arch of Septimius Severus, Hadrian’s Baths and the Severan Basilica were unearthed. My great-grandfather, Cesare Mariani, was a religious painter who created frescoes in churches and basilicas across Rome.”
