Francesco Tatò (12 August 1932 – 2 November 2022) was an Italian businessman. He was known as "Kaiser Franz" for the tough management methods he used to achieve economic turnarounds at the companies where he was appointed CEO. He was married to Italian writer and television author and producer Sonia Raule.

Tatò obtained a philosophy degree from the University of Pavia, Ghislieri College, with a dissertation in theoretical philosophy on Max Weber; Enzo Paci was his dissertation advisor. Economically independent thanks to obtaining a scholarship, he decided to continue his education with two years of study in Munich and Münster, Germany; he then went on to study at Harvard, holding a Fulbright scholarship.

In 1956, at the age of 24, Tatò began his long rise through the ranks at the Olivetti Group, where for the first six months he worked on the assembly line at the company's Ivrea plant. "I personally consider that period to be one of the most useful for me in a formative sense, because working on the assembly line helped me to understand the priorities and the values of the people who worked there." After joining Olivetti in 1956, Tatò climbed the corporate ladder until he reached the top management. The company tasked him with returning troubled foreign subsidiaries to health. From 1970 to 1973 he was CEO of Austro Olivetti in Vienna, Austria. From 1974 to 1976 he worked as CEO of British Olivetti in London. These were to be the first of many similar assignments.

In 1976 Tatò returned to Germany as CEO of Deutsche Olivetti GmbH in Frankfurt, where he remained until 1980 when he was appointed Director of Foreign Sales for the Olivetti Group. Tatò left Olivetti temporarily from 1982 to 1984. He took the job as CEO of the Mannesmann-Kienzle Group in Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany. In 1986 he returned to Olivetti with the task of restructuring Triumph-Adler, a company with over 9,000 employees which had built up a significant business in the office equipment and computer sector and which had just been purchased by the Italian company from Volkswagen. In just two years Tatò was able to turn the company around thanks to strict cost-cutting policies and reorganization measures to boost production efficiency and launch technologically innovative products.

Tatò spent 1989 and 1990 at the head of Olivetti Office, a division specialized in the production and worldwide sale of office equipment and computers. The sector was in the depths of a profound crisis in this period. At the end of the year, due to growing organizational and strategic disagreements with the head of the group, Carlo De Benedetti, Francesco Tatò and Olivetti agreed to split; in the eyes of the public and in reality this was not an amicable agreement. In August 2012 Tatò had this to say when questioned by a journalist about Olivetti's demise and disappearance from the world IT market:

"Olivetti was a splendid example of technologically and socially advanced industry in post-war Italy. [...] Few companies followed its example, and as a matter of fact it was roundly criticized by the business establishment of the time. Many very talented managers with international experience got their start in Olivetti. In the late seventies and early eighties, with the first crisis behind it, what we might call Adriano Olivetti's unmanaged legacy, it had to adapt and compete with the entrance of electronics in the office equipment market and with the organizational upheaval of the business caused by the development and runaway success of the personal computer. Above all, during Carlo De Benedetti's management, the company got all its technological choices wrong and was unable to take advantage of the huge potential of its sales organization and the young and talented technicians it had at its disposal. [...] what destroyed one of the biggest Italian companies was blind management and a product strategy which was wrong for many years. I cannot pretend I was not opposed to this, and indeed I was fired when Olivetti Office, the sector I was responsible for, returned a profit, just like all the Olivetti subsidiaries which I had overseen first hand. For Olivetti, just like any other company, the results are what counts: look at the results against the names of the managers, anything else is just gossip and hearsay. It was painful to see for those of us who had believed in the company until the last, and a great loss for the whole of Italy."

— Interview by Vincenzo Pascale, 12 August 2012.

Tatò had his first experience in the world of publishing before his time at Triumph Adler. From 1984 to 1986 he took the helm of the major Italian publisher Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. In the space of a few months he became vice president and CEO.