So…after coming back from Cape Code, I can say:
Quickness: confronted by the new, very quick media forcefully making their way into the new millennium, Calvino states that “the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different”. Such a function operates through a mental quickness that cannot be measured and owes its value to the pleasure it arouses, not to any practical purpose, as in the case of computers. Yet Calvino also maintains that quickness produces good literary results only when it is combined with slowness.
Could we propose a better synthesis to the world of business or a more effective code to self empowering than the one based on the balance of reconciled opposites, especially in a world increasingly dominated by speed?
Exactitude: by this code Calvino means the well defined design of a literary work, the conjuring up of sharp visual images and the use of an accurate language.
Notwithstanding the natural appeal of infinity on human beings, literature tends towards exactitude. The work of literature should be “…one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form…alive as an organism”.
If we apply Calvino’s conception of literary accuracy to the needs of any professional, we will find useful hints on how to plan goals, speak clearly and try to establish personal interrelationship marked by sincerity.
Visibility: this is an instrument every human being must resort to, by continuously projecting images to and from his inner sight: in Calvino’s opinion, the present age is marked by a more intense use of visual means than in the past.
In this modern civilization of the images, we must be careful not to lose our faculty of focusing on daydreams.
As regards goal projecting, we could say that we must find the courage to dream so that a new thought may spring from a dream and be the “builder” of concrete realities.
Multiplicity: the last quality described by Calvino in his American Lessons deals with contemporary novel or generally with “the literary text to function simultaneously as an encyclopaedia and a method of knowledge and a way of connecting facts, people and things”. The correct application of this concept to the business world is confirmed by the most recent studies on trend-setting companies, owing their success to the set up of networks.
Empowering means increasing something which is in being, in progress, in a perspective of improvement, but it may also mean acting and actuating whatever is latent (or potential) and still to be actuated!!!