FRED
LACHOTZKI

FROM GOOD TO GREAT

BIOGRAPHY

CONTACT

KEY MESSAGE

Businesses fulfill the role as motors for prosperity and affluence
The weighty managerial duty confronting business leaders in today's world is simply not (or not only barely) able to be fulfilled using currently familiar concepts and paradigms*
There is a need to make value-creation explicit - to "heighten value"
Broad-based employee ownership should be part of the vision

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

Business - to include executive- and superisory boards - is losing its societal legitimacy
There are too many unfortunate episodes within and among enterprises
Many still try to shield the Truth in today's "open" world
A difference has arisen between normative and objective facts
Employee loyalty is diminishing

WHAT IS THE CAUSE?

It lies in human and system failures:

An imbalance between freedom and control
The disconnect between company loyalty and splintering of contemporary society (e.g. increased rate work-at-home)
Lack of confronting the Brutal facts
"Black boxes" within enterprises
Lack of transparency in communication and decision-making
Lack of any quantifiable, "holistic" method for assigning responsibility
Lack of any permanent, balanced "Corporate Dialogue"
The splitting of people's inner life among competing impulses: between the striving towards a well-understood self-interest seeking freedom and the realization of a release from the burden of having to make moral choices
Lack of courage

HOW CAN THINGS BE DONE BETTER?

This is why we must build a Future in which the enterprise can offer perspective - without thereby relieving governmental authorities of their own responsibilities - by deliberately taking up the role of motor for prosperity and affluence. And by "affluence" I mean affluance shared among all parties involved in a business, including societal affluence for the localities in which it operates. By deliberately taking up this role, the enterprise accepts that it can be, may be and will be structurally challenged on it.

We must:

Challenge businesses on their role as motor for prosperity and affluence
Allow each business its own voice
Structure and lead enterprises as the complex systems which they are
When employees have skin in the game, performance follows
Find a structured balance between freedom and control
Determine which elements enable an enterprise's value-creation (in the broadest sense of that phrase) and then use the insights, rules, fitness criteria and norms that can be derived out of complexity theory as guides to have that enterprise "evolve" and be organized around those criteria
Conclude psychological contracts, based on confidence in people's abilities and fitness criteria. In this way implicit behavioral rules can be derived for relations between Management, the Board and all involved stakeholders.
Make explicit and make public the status of an organization's capabilities, just as consistently and in-detail as we do for financial results.
Make clear that a culture is in force of personal and business moral responsibility, as well as the willingness to act upon that.

This demands a structure that unlocks knowledge, that enlarges transparency and - without running any risk of losing command - that facilitates and stimulates a freedom to decide and to act.

SO HOW WILL IT LOOK?

It will be a management concept which, thanks to transparency in decision-making, will be able to guide business so as to limit the failure of the enterprise as a system as well as failure in human behavior. With this concept, the enterprise will be able to boost its power, reduce its vulnerability and preserve its societal legimitacy. **

* The recent failure rate of chief executives in big companies points in the same direction. The responsibility they took on had become undoable; it suggests system failure. Top management in big organizations needs a new concept. Fred Lachotzki, May 2026

** See: A Plea for a Future, Valedictory lecture, Fred Lachotzki November 2016