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is again necessary because even in this approach an old school of the economy is visible that has long been regarded as outdated and rather serves a human image of scientific management than a systemic approach.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.