Executive Summary: We assess companies through personal morality rather than objective equations. The Holistic Company Model replaces “right versus wrong” with “correct versus incorrect,” defining a good enterprise by two objective conditions: balancing incentives across all stakeholder groups and maintaining agreed-upon, long-term financial sustainability.
Simple questions are often the hardest ones to answer. But they are also the most important ones.
Poll the next five people you meet and ask them two simple questions:
I bet the answers will be different and conflicting.
Every single thing around us is touched and moved by companies. But we lack a definition of what a ‘good’ company is. The lack of such an effective definition and its broad acceptance result in dysfunctional behaviors within the concept of companies.
We have collective anxiety around companies because we assess them through a right vs. wrong lens. Right vs. Wrong is a morality question, and morality is ALWAYS personal. One person’s right is someone else’s wrong.
The Holistic Company Model is a Correct vs. Incorrect equation. Equations are objective, and they balance or don’t balance. It's not a matter of opinion.
The holistic company model satisfies all the intended conditions of a capitalistic enterprise while avoiding its most common form of mutation: capital engineering. It addresses the problems every stakeholder group complains about.
Holistic companies satisfy two conditions.
Condition 1: Holistic companies maintain an equilibrium state that balances the incentives of all stakeholder groups. The stakeholder groups are: Investors, customers, employees, partners (including vendors), and society. But please do not trivialize the three crucial terms—Equilibrium, balance, and incentives—based on other contexts.
Condition 2: Holistic companies are financially sustainable for a period that all stakeholders align on, considering cash flow, debt, counterparty, and adverse behavior risks.
Many entities that meet the Holistic Company Model exist today. But many more do not. We can change that with deeper education and alignment on the definition of ‘good’ companies. The only give to be a torchbearer for the holistic company model is forethought and discipline.
John Oommen is an electrical engineer turned company-level evolution architect who partners with private company investors and middle-market CEOs to mature and transform portfolio companies. He is the author of Congruence: The Playmaker's Guide to High Value Companies, creator of the underlying proprietary Congruence mindset, model, and method, and pioneer of the Playmaker Capability, which is a must-have value injection mechanism that dovetails purpose, strategy, and operations.
Over more than two decades, John has led company-level transformations, M&A integrations, and operational turnarounds across dozens of mid-market, VC and PE-backed, and Fortune 100 companies, including General Electric, Accenture, Blue Ridge Partners, and Capital One, as well as enterprise clients like Emerson, Ferguson, Cox, Avaya, and Nortek, alongside numerous mid-market companies. He specializes in addressing business-to-business market problems spanning industrial manufacturing, distribution, technology, and tech-enabled services. John holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and is based in Chicago.
