Outside perspective: why a company no longer sees itself

In this Italian-language video, shot in Piazza del Duomo in Florence, I say that taking on a business strategist means welcoming an outside way of thinking, one able to read what can no longer be seen from the inside. Here I explain, with a passage from Georg Simmel’s 1908 Sociology, why things stop being visible from the inside. I also explain what Brunelleschi’s dome adds to the image of the keystone: the dome does not have one.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

There are companies that think they can be completely self-sufficient in everything.

They believe all it takes is a good product, a bit of advertising, a few well-written posts on social media, and maybe the occasional promotion here and there.

But what is sometimes missing is not ability: it is vision.

Taking on a business strategist does not mean bringing in a consultant.

First of all, it means welcoming an outside way of thinking, one able to read what, from the inside, can no longer be seen.

The business owner lives immersed in their own ecosystem: they breathe the same habits, perhaps for years, repeat the same phrases, cultivate the same rituals.

The business strategist is the figure who interrupts the noise, who restores distance, who gives back a sense of direction.

It is an act of humility, and at the same time of courage, to recognize that growth does not come only from production, but from understanding.

And Florence, where we are today for a few meetings, after all teaches us exactly this: that every great undertaking is born when the artist meets the architect, when form meets function, when someone, at last, manages to see from above the work they are building.

The business strategist, after all, is one of the keystones of the company.

It is not at the center, but in the structure.

It does not impose itself; it connects.

It is a presence that holds vision and reality together, to give continuity to the meaning of everything that has been built.

From the inside, habits stop being visible

Someone who has run a company for many years knows it better than anyone else, and for that very reason sees less and less of it. Habits that arose to solve a problem remain even when the problem is gone. The phrases repeated at every meeting stop being heard and become background noise, as I say in the video.

That is how experience works: what you do every day you do without thinking, and what you do without thinking, at some point, you no longer see. As long as the habits are good, this is an advantage, because it frees attention for everything else. It becomes a risk when they stop being good, because from the inside no one notices in time.

From the inside, a company stops seeing its own habits: to see them, it needs someone close enough to know it and far enough away not to take them for granted.

The word “outside,” on its own, says little. An observer who arrives, looks and leaves again sees a company’s habits, but does not yet know what they mean, why they arose and whether they are still useful. To understand that, you have to stay long enough to get to know them.

Simmel’s stranger comes today and stays tomorrow

In 1908 the German sociologist Georg Simmel included a digression of a few pages in his Sociology: the Excursus on the Stranger (Exkurs über den Fremden). The stranger he describes is not the wanderer “who comes today and goes tomorrow,” but “the person who comes today and stays tomorrow.” He is someone who enters a group without having been born into it. His position depends precisely on this: “he has not belonged to it from the beginning,” and “he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.”

From this position, Simmel writes, comes a particular kind of objectivity. The stranger is not bound from the start to any side within the group or to its tendencies, and so he can look at all of them. His objectivity is “a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.”

In 1908 Georg Simmel described the stranger as “the person who comes today and stays tomorrow,” and his objectivity as a structure of distance and nearness.

Simmel also noted an effect of this objectivity, which applies above all, but not only, to the stranger who moves on. People often confide the most surprising things to him, at times in the tone of a confession: things they keep hidden from those close to them.

This is what I mean when I say in the video that taking on a business strategist does not mean bringing in a consultant. The consultant who delivers a plan and leaves resembles Simmel’s wanderer. The strategist is closer to the other figure, the one who comes in and stays, as I describe in the piece on the invisible architect: someone who knows the people and the numbers, and keeps the distance of a person not born into that company.

In Brunelleschi’s dome, what holds it together cannot be seen

The video was shot in Piazza del Duomo, where the meeting of different crafts left two traces in stone. In 1334 Giotto, who was a painter, was appointed capomaestro, or master builder, of the Opera del Duomo, the institution in charge of building the cathedral. That same year work began on the bell tower that bears his name. Almost a century later the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore was built by Filippo Brunelleschi. He had started out as a goldsmith, and in 1404 he had been enrolled as a master in the Arte della Seta, the silk guild. This is the meeting of the artist and the architect that I talk about in the video: the city entrusted its most important building project to two men who had come from another craft.

In the video I also say that the business strategist is one of the keystones of a company, and that the role sits not at the center but in the structure. In an arch the keystone is the stone at the top that holds the others in place. It is the image I also use to explain why my work is hard to grasp. Seen up close, the dome adds something to this image. Its ribs converge on a ring at the top, the oculus, on which the lantern rests. The lantern’s weight helps to balance the thrusts (Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore). The dome is also held together by elements that cannot be seen from below: chains of stone blocks joined by iron clamps, and a chain of chestnut beams installed in the 1420s. They run all the way around the dome, inside the structure, like belts.

They are the part of the structure that no one notices when looking up, and they work around the whole circumference. They are a good image of work like mine, which is about making connections.

Even an outside perspective, in time, gets used to things

Simmel calls the stranger a potential wanderer, one who has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. His distance depends on that freedom, and from this I draw a conclusion for my own work: whoever stays inside a company for a long time learns its phrases and begins to find its habits normal.

Distance wears thin: whoever stays too long begins to see the company the way the people who work there see it, and that is one of the reasons an engagement has a fixed term.

It is one more reason, alongside the one I give in answer to why an engagement lasts six months or a year: the results of a business strategy are measured in six-month periods, and the perspective that makes them possible needs to remain an outside one.

The other condition concerns the company. An outside perspective sees only what the company lets it see: the numbers, the open problems, the difficult decisions. Opening up like this to someone who was not born into it is, as I say in the video, an act of humility and, at the same time, of courage. That is why I have great respect for those who make this choice: they ask to be looked at precisely where, on their own, they can no longer see. Part of the work on organization and culture is about exactly this: the habits and unwritten rules that the people who live with them every day no longer notice.

What to do and what not to do

• Ask newcomers what they find strange, before they stop finding it strange.
• Give the outside perspective access to everything, including the numbers and problems that are usually kept out of sight.
• Choose someone who will stay long enough to know the company, and agree from the start when their work will end.
• Do not mistake knowing your own company for being able to see it.
• Do not ask an outside perspective to confirm what you already think.

Sources

• Georg Simmel, “Exkurs über den Fremden,” in Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig, 1908, pp. 685–691; Italian edition: “Excursus sullo straniero,” in Sociologia, translated by Giorgio Giordano, introduction by Alessandro Cavalli, Edizioni di Comunità, 1989, pp. 580–584.
• Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, 1950, pp. 402–408. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.215265/2015.215265.The-Sociology_djvu.txt
• Antonio De Simone, “L’inquieta prossimità. Lo straniero e il migrante secondo Simmel,” Post-Filosofie, 9, 2016, pp. 59–70. https://ojs.cimedoc.uniba.it/index.php/postfil/article/download/990/816/2925
• Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, “La cupola.” https://duomo.firenze.it/it/40/cupola
• Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Opera Magazine, article on the death of Giotto, January 8, 1337 (Giotto capomaestro from 1334). https://duomo.firenze.it/it/opera-magazine/post/4622/january-8-1337-marked-the-death-of-giotto-di-bondone
• Isabelle Hyman, “Brunelleschi, Filippo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1972. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/filippo-brunelleschi_(Dizionario-Biografico)//)
• Federica Ottoni, Sofia Celli, “From the Document to Knowledge: the Constructive History of the Wooden Ring of the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore,” ArcHistoR, IX (17), 2022, pp. 6–39. https://doi.org/10.14633/AHR348