Principles
One term that deserves explaining, and five standards that have survived six decades.
philosopher
What ‘practical philosopher’ means
Philosopher is not a protected title. It is not conferred; it is practised.
Practical philosophy is not a collection of theories. It is thinking as a craft: clarifying terms, drawing distinctions, changing perspective, weighing consequences. It is the opposite of an opinion.
It becomes practical wherever it improves decisions, resolves conflict, makes values visible and grounds responsibility. Which is precisely where entrepreneurs work.
Reichelt never put his questions in a seminar room. He put them on the shop floor. What do I owe a customer? Which forms of organisation create responsibility, and which prevent it? How do you decide under uncertainty? He did not write the answers down; he built them: as a working-time model, as a portal, as a company structure. That is where they were tested.
The stance that goes with it cannot be delegated: intellectual honesty, the courage to face what is true, freedom from ideology, and a willingness to carry the consequences of one's own thinking.
Many of the most influential thinkers in history were merchants, strategists, physicians or statesmen. Not professors.
Everything in the company starts from the customer
Since his apprenticeship, Reichelt has thought instinctively from the customer inwards. Not only product development: organisation, engineering, communication and service as well.
Marketing is not a department. Marketing is the highest task of management.
Delegate it to a department and you have removed the customer's view from the running of the company. It is the most common quiet mistake, in large corporations as much as in mid-sized firms.
benefit
Every relationship has to work both ways
For Reichelt, the obligation to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement applies not only to customers but equally to suppliers, partners and staff.
An agreement in which one side loses is not a good deal. It is a relationship with an expiry date.
customers
Turn customers into fans
Reichelt issued this instruction back in 1990/91, years before customer enthusiasm became a term in the marketing literature.
The reasoning behind it is unsentimental: fans forgive. No company avoids mistakes entirely. But a customer who has felt understood for years will carry a mistake with you rather than punish it. That makes dealing with customers easier and heads off most of the consequences that unavoidable mistakes otherwise bring.
It also places an obligation on the company: that trust has to be earned again by its conduct every day.
handshake
A merchant's word
An old principle among merchants: the spoken word is binding. At its heart it is a question of honesty.
Reichelt regrets openly that the principle has largely disappeared from business life. Whoever outmanoeuvres the other side most skilfully is counted the winner. Preferably with no mutual benefit at all.
For him the handshake is not nostalgia for better days but a working standard. A commitment holds. Difficulties are raised openly. Good suppliers deserve loyalty, even when a better price is available elsewhere. Because to a supplier you are the customer, and the same rules run in both directions.
thinker
The freedom to decide differently
Reichelt has rarely accepted a way of doing things because it was the usual way. He wanted to understand the reasons. Where the reasons did not convince him, he developed his own approach, as early as his apprenticeship, when he wrote customer correspondence in a tone that did not exist at the time.
Free thinking comes at a price, however, and Reichelt insists on it: whoever decides differently must carry the consequences. Anyone who passes them to others is not a free thinker but a liability.
That sentence is the foundation of the Agentic Leadership Architecture at Transpareo AG today.
‘Habit is not an argument.’