The Mission in that Billboard in Via Sarfatti

"It was decided to try to promote the MBA also abroad and so Claudio Demattè sent Enrico Valdani around Europe, to Brussels and Frankfurt, to look for graduate students. There was a problem: the Master was in Italian." And the unexpected thing was that Valdani succeeded. Vittorio Coda, Italy's eminent business scholar who was one of the founders of the SDA Bocconi School of Management and led it as President until 1996, reveals how. "This was in 1974, a rocky year for the country. Faced with the objections from foreigners who considered Italy a poorly organized country, unable even to govern itself, Demattè had invented a very convincing answer, which Valdani made his own: 'Imagine then how good Italian entrepreneurs and managers are, since they manage to excel in such a situation'."

Coda's anecdote illustrates what SDA was like in those early years. A group of young professors animated by great courage and spirit of initiative. SDA had been born in 1971 on the ashes of a two-year evening course in Economics and Business Management that had existed since the 1950s and which Giordano Dell'Amore and Carlo Masini had decided to suspend for a year. "It was a very traditional course, which conveyed the image of a Bocconi unable to renew itself, not a credible interlocutor for managers and companies. Roberto Ruozi and I," says Coda, "redesigned it, introducing modern, interactive lessons. And we hired a new, young faculty. Then Ruozi talked about it with Demattè, who had returned from the United States, and from that course SDA was born".
It was a flourishing of highly successful initiatives: "We created executive courses, an evening program on the management of credit firms, and I remember the buses chartered by banks that brought their executives to attend class after work". This climate of enthusiasm at SDA spread to the whole of Bocconi, helping to renew its image. But there was no time to rest on early successes. The next step, as with any self-respecting business school, was the creation of a full-fledged MBA. "Our reference was Harvard Business School, where Demattè had worked," says Coda, "and our faculty members began to attend international courses, such as the International Teachers Program, that came out of Harvard. What emerged were professors capable of introducing interactive and effective teaching, with recourse to case histories and discussions. But above all," underscores Vittorio Coda," they were people who devoted time not only to the contents of courses, but also to the planning of the entire teaching process".

This is a concept that is dear to Coda's heart, because it was a real revolution, something that no one in Italy did at the time. And this fueled the enthusiasm to complete the MBA project for which, Coda recalls, "chief executive Luigi Guatri hired and funded a group of researchers, coming from various disciplinary areas, who would work full time on the project". It was the first MBA ever established in Italy and, even if one makes the effort, it is difficult to fully understand the significance of that event from today's perspective. "Asking working professionals to leave their jobs for a year and go back to school met many obstacles at the time," explains Coda, "Directors of personnel were against it. For them, managers were created by working in the field. The first MBA students were really brave." It was, in a sense, a cultural revolution. But where else, if not at Bocconi?
"Demattè had a billboard permanently hanging on the ground floor of the SDA headquarters, which then occupied the first two floors of the Via Sarfatti building. It had inscribed the sentence 'A management school serves the community when...' and there followed a list of reasons that completed the concept. Here," says Coda," we felt we were on a mission, we strongly wanted Bocconi to have a modern business school that would serve the community, which would render a service to the country. Almost 50 years since that billboard was posted, I feel like saying the goal has been fully achieved ".