"When I cross him in the corridor, I too feel like a dry branch to be cut," said Silvio Berlusconi, who had to hire him as CEO of Fininvest on the instructions of the banks to put the accounts on a sounder footing. Franco Tatò, the manager who died on Wednesday at the age of 90, smiled but never wavered and remained faithful to his reputation as a relentless business remediator and cost cutter: from the first years at Olivetti to the German companies Mannesman-Kienzle and Triumph Adler, the experience at Mondadori, up to the 6 years in which he turned Enel upside down, transforming it from a bureaucratic pachyderm into a multinational company listed on the stock exchange, with 20 thousand fewer employees and quadrupled profits, from 1.2 to 4.5 billion. To implement the liberalization of the electricity market desired by Prodi, he had to sell a third of the power plants and reinvested the proceeds in TLC with the invention of Wind, in renewables with Enel Green Power, in IT and in expansion abroad with the first acquisition in Spain. Tatò was a cultured manager, with a degree in philosophy and a thesis on Max Weber, the theorist of the ethics of capitalism that he tried to put into practice.-
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