In an unhealthy company, employees, customers, suppliers, and their representatives are just resources that have to work. This corresponds to a long outdated image of men from scientific management and Fordism, which, however, is unfortunately still and felt in practice in recent years again strongly increasingly to be found. The tendency to reform is not a necessity, but a means to an end at the expense of the quality of the partnership in order to increase one’s own profit. The motto: The collaborating, supplying, buying person must adapt to the system and function. If he does not function, he is replaced.

In the Human Resources and Human Relations approaches that will follow later, the motivation of people has been recognized as a business success factor – but it is still only a means to an end. The motivation of the human being must, therefore, be exploited as optimally as possible in order to achieve one’s own selfish corporate goals. The logical consequence of this attitude is often the attempt with and without cheap tricks to exploit the motivation of employees, suppliers, and customers for one’s own advantage. This does not really mean that something is gained in the interests of the stakeholders. Thus a self-generated togetherness arises, which is a game of losing between exploitation, submission, hypocrisy, and camouflage in both directions. The result is neither professional quality nor excellent results and successes, a large part of the energy goes into the “strategic management” of relationships, instead of creating high product and service quality and optimal result achievement. Actually, there is no friendly solidarity with mutual esteem and common goals, but only an exploiting community of convenience. True integrity (connectedness) does not exist in such cooperation, but it can be found wherever top performance is required.

What would happen if the key to releasing authentic motivation were to lie in seeking and recognizing the real benefits for the employee, the supplier and the customer? A real bond, a real wholeness (integrity) as a starting point. The consequences of such a claim attitude towards the action partners would be that one would truly turn one’s attention to the successful participants and consider how they can really be integrated in order to become better themselves, as it were. This means that the partners do not merely have to function, but that they form a unity with each other (integrity). It is no longer primarily a matter of exploiting the other for one’s own advantage, but of developing further in partnership through mutual respect and esteem.