If a general manager Museums of the Ministry writes a manual of the good public manager

Hard to make comparisons. A publication like Antonio Lampis’s Handbook of the Good Manager and Good Civil Servant (Editrice Bibliografica, 2024) you would expect at the end of your career. A sort of “handover” in a semi-serious key, intended for new recruits in the public service, but also in large companies, to provide practical suggestions on how to juggle the myriad bureaucratic fetters.

Or perhaps not, precisely the icastic and at times irreverent key with which the “polite advice” referred to in the subtitle is declined, with incisive jokes effectively accompanied by the illustrations of Luca Dal Pozzolo, architect and co-founder of the Fitzcarraldo Foundation, makes us grasp the sense of the operation: a booklet in medias res, which at a certain point in his career Lampis, director of the Department of Italian Culture and Economic Development of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, formerly director general Museums of the MiC, in the cultural sector since 1997, felt the “need” to dismiss. As if, in the midst of handling a file, the senior bureaucrat had said to himself, “here, experience is needed here, laws and regulations are not enough.” And he had jotted down the valuable ad hoc “advice” for the new crop of administrators. Like a brushstroke of color given to the grayness of bureaucratese. After all, Lampis writes it clearly: “administrative acts coming out of a public office should not be thought of only with the legal mechanism, otherwise you would not be officials or managers, but lawyers. It is very important to have a sense of the social, political, media consequences of the measures.”

The most endearing thing about this handbook is the register that varies and holds together order and ... wriggle: the organization of advice into alphabetical headings, typical of traditional reference works, and the semi-serious tone of when, for example, the author finds it useful to remember that “bartenders and those next to you at the counter have ears.” Insidiousness lurks where alertness defenses are lowered!

One can only begin with the “A” for “hiring,” but immediately followed by the same letter is the less predictable, almost a manifesto of intent, “authenticity”: “reselling other people’s work by putting a cherry on it just because you are the boss will in the long run make you lose authenticity.” As if to say that megalomaniac delusions will in the long run make the leader lose credibility. “A good executive is not one who is on top, but one who intervenes after and imagines before,” Lampis warns. After all, as Ugo Morelli quoted in the book, “the hallmark of a good leader is to work for his or her own replaceability.”

A booklet, too, firmly anchored in a democratic creed that leaks out on several occasions, such as when under the heading “authoritarianism” it is reminded that the leader must “be a guarantor of the pluralism of ideas” or when ethical values of constitutional rank are invoked. In the “C” for “corruption,” a scourge “clearly making a comeback,” there is also room for the bitter observation that it is, beyond all Transparency international reports, a real “way of life.”

But how does one make “a career”? for Lampis “is often the reward for autonomy and courage,” although the call for autonomy sounds more like the projection of a reality one would like rather than an actual scenario. Or if you will, it takes courage to remain autonomous.

The dusting off of the bestiary category for the description of recurring types of politicians and managers is tasty: ranging from the “official politician” to the “fly-by-night politician,” from the “executive yes-man” to “the manager.”

It could not miss, then, the entry “artificial intelligence,” where we read one of the smartest (pun intended) reflections around, against a sea of obscurantist concerns: “Most concerned people forget,” Lampis writes, "that even artificial intelligence is part of nature, because, like a gigantic and very complex anthill, it is nevertheless the fruit of the industrious work of an animal, the human being. Back in the 1980s, a beautiful scene in the film Blade Runner reminded us of these shaky boundaries: in the dystopian era imagined by the film, animals were either very rare or forbidden. The protagonist sees a beautiful owl in the halls of the house of the owner of the big company that produces replicants and points to it and asks the person accompanying him, ’Is it artificial?’ She replies, ’Of course.’"

In short, a genuine and lively dedication to one’s work shines through from these pages, which give original interpretive angles. Lampis’ Handbook is perhaps also an unintentional “autobiography” of forty years of administrative experience marked by episodes of encounter with places, works and people. In some cases he even names them, as with Antonella Pasqua Recchia, Secretary General of the MiC (“from whom I learned a lot”). Otherwise he warns that “any reference to facts and people who really existed is purely coincidental.”

A book that cannot fail to become an indispensable vademecum for young managers and officials (and not only), but also for those who, from a long course in the administration, can “discover” a different key with which to deal with stacks of documents. With texts that are accessible and enjoyable even for the other half of the sky, the so-called users, thanks to the clear and effective style that allows them to follow the interweaving of the various situations addressed.

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