The rules of Good Governance Practice require transparency by means of prompt, continuous and comprehensive information as well as independence. The providers of information and concepts as a basis of important corporate decisions – corporate experts and external consultants – act according to their natural interests and answer to the corporate management.

The non-executive institutions such as the supervisory board require independent, professional validation of those concepts. That is what we do without having any professional interest towards corporate management.

Thus our business model is based on two principles:

• Independence: We refrain from doing conventional consulting projects for businesses.
• Competence: We combine long term top-management consulting experience with equally long corporate management experience in executive positions in the respective industries and functions.

Like all groups with a hierarchical setup, corporations are interested in inner stability. This results in group dynamics often leading to one of two outcomes. Either diverging opinions are not honored, at least not actively requested, or even – partly unintentionally – suppressed. Or, a positive-constructive atmosphere encourages group members to support corporate management for the sake of achieving the overarching goals and to focus more on the opportunities than the risks. If the corporate goals are threatened, minds can harden to siege mentality.

Those phenomena have been observed regularly and are scientifically sound. It has been shown that decisions tend to have higher quality and less risk once group think has been disrupted.

Our work is based on this principle.

We believe:

• Nothing is going to work just because everyone says so.
• Nothing is guaranteed to work if there is no example for it.
• If there are examples of failure, they could also be relevant for the existing case.

Validation requires independence from the companies and organizations to be validated.

This means for us:

• We focus exclusively on validation consulting, renouncing all other types of engagements.
• We decline all mandates initiated solely by the executive branch.
• We will decline, suspend or terminate the engagement if the quality and the independence of the result are compromised, i.e. through denied access to information or people.

Our exclusive orientation towards validation facilitates the acceptance of the results by all interest groups because all results will be interpreted as independent.