Innovation is a self-runner in healthy companies, it is a matter of course. In a healthy company, other dynamics prevail. In sick companies, innovation must be initiated, generated and implemented under pressure.

In healthy companies, on the other hand, the employee no longer sees himself as someone who has to complete an order. He does it of his own free will, precisely because he has recognized that he is making a meaningful contribution to (world) society and not just earning a living.

In a healthy company, the employee sees himself as someone who has the task of reinventing the company, his own job, and even himself on a daily basis, and thus being the motor of innovation. 

Whether an employee, a supplier or even a customer is prepared to show such a degree of integrity towards the company depends to a large extent on how he is treated and how he deals with himself. In a healthy company, every stakeholder knows that he or she is important and valued for success. He is not a means to an end, but a partner. He notices that his contribution can make a difference and is valued for it. This appreciation forms the basis of his integrity and is the foundation of his performance and will.

Here, too, an urgent paradigm shift is necessary. In particular, the higher-level controlling and management processes in most companies prevent employees, suppliers, and customers from seeing themselves as innovators. The lack of inclusion and consideration prevents integrity in relation to the assumption of responsibility for the future by the employee. The employee withdraws into his excerpt, does not think and act innovatively in the sense of the whole company, which would also immediately bring him into massive conflict with the existing systems. The innovative power of employees, suppliers, and customers is massively blocked and does not benefit the company. The situation is quite different with companies that succeed in having their employees see themselves as innovation managers who have the mandate and mandate to reinvent the company and themselves every day.

Conclusion

Healthy companies are the organizations in which or with which people want to work permanently as employees, suppliers or customers. They experience esteem, partnership, joint development and shaping the future. Healthy companies create integrity together with their partners and are resilient, stable and innovative. They make a contribution to society and consequently produce social relevance and sustainability.

In healthy companies, success is not based on the harm done to others. Healthy companies do not make losers. Neither the supplier nor the customer nor the employee is exploited and made a loser. Exactly this is, however, the today prevailing model in particular of many large companies. The fact that this exploitation model is not systemically balanced and thus cannot lead to entrepreneurial success in the long term is as certain as our knowledge that balancing justice is sought in every system. The fewer losers there are, the more stable a system is. This fact leads to healthy companies using all the levers to avoid that there are losers in the company’s system.

Excellence at all levels always emerges by itself where there are no losers.

If everyone is a winner, everyone gives their best, because the condition is optimal. If someone feels like a loser, he will make his bet dependent on how much a winning position can be expected. It is therefore almost logical that healthy companies do everything they can to ensure that not only does nobody feel like a loser, but also that nobody is a loser, neither the supplier, nor the customer, nor the employee.

The opposite can be observed at the moment. Many companies are pursuing the declared strategy of improving their profits on the basis of better strategic exploitation of suppliers, employees, and customers. Such an approach inevitably leads to the loss of stability and resilience as well as sustainability and uncertainty of the continued existence of the company. Even if the aforementioned effects do not occur immediately, the effect after the dam has broken is all the more devastating for the company.

In the practice of management consulting, it can be observed again and again that companies claim pure profit maximization as their highest goal. Stilblüten are driven there, where a bare turnover or profit goal is spent as a vision of the enterprise, possibly still with missing or inappropriate coworker and/or high-level personnel participation in economic success. It is hard to believe how intellectually underdeveloped a company’s employees will be, assuming that such a mission and vision could have even a trace of motivating effect.

Healthy companies are on a morally “good” and desirable mission with the entire corporate community (investors, employees, suppliers, customers). The mission describes why it is good that the company’s products/services exist and why or how they help. Whether mobility, flexibility, recreation, comfort, workability, information, assistance, nutrition… and a thousand other meaningful things – without a world-changing and problem-solving mission, the organization loses its basic right to exist. So it can never be the mission of the company to make as much profit as possible and at the same time to develop a meaningful effect with this mission. Healthy companies ALWAYS see their mission, the beneficial mission in the foreground and regard the operating result as the effect of their sense creation. In particular, this promotes integrity (wholeness/connectedness) of all those involved with the company.

The vision is always nourished by the mission, by the mission that needs to be visionarily expanded. An unhealthy understanding of vision and mission in the company abolishes identification and integrity with the organization and reduces people to a purely extrinsic, motivated being. A paradigm shift is again necessary because even in this approach an old school of the economy is visible that has long been regarded as outdated and rather serves a human image of scientific management than a systemic approach.

Healthy organizations do almost everything they can to keep employees and even suppliers and customers informed about the usefulness and social contribution of their products and services.

In healthy organizations, the vision never describes a size goal, but always a social impact.

The corporate strategy is the sum of all the plans of managers and employees in the company, which are intended to make the long-term survival of the company possible by considering the possible alternative future prospects in the company and the environments relevant to the company.

The target bearers of every strategy are all those involved in the company, not just the management because everyone is affected and interested in the continued existence of the company. Strategy development and implementation is still regarded as a top-down process in large parts of the academic world and, above all, by most management consultancies. Here an almost impenetrable dogma prevails. The justification for this approach is that it is necessary to set targets from above because employees are not competent to develop the strategy. Behind this paradigm of thinking, which has been conveyed for many years, a Tayloristic approach can be seen: A distinction is made between manual and mental work. And practice teaches us better over and over again: In almost every company in which the strategy is understood as a TOP-DOWN process, we have observed for years that it basically dies at the second or at the latest third management level and from then on is no longer implemented in the company. Even the middle management therefore no longer really accepts the strategy, not to mention the employees who carry out the daily work. Even complex measures to communicate strategy are often unsuccessful, it does not penetrate into the workforce, is neither understood, affirmed and internalized nor lived. Who is surprised? A paradigm shift is urgently needed here.

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.