Neuguss in conversation –

Peter Piechotta has been working at Neuguss for over 40 years in various roles, and as such has been part of this group of companies across almost its entire history so far. He joined STOCKMAR as a product developer at the start of the 1980s, going on to become managing director until 2013, before moving to the Management Board of Neuguss as well as taking a seat on the Management Board of its Foundation.

What connects you personally to Neuguss?

The starting point for my work at Neuguss was my quest for community building and to change the world. I have now been able to engage with this task for 40 years, and I’m very grateful to all of my colleagues within and outside Neuguss. When I turned 60 and handed over management of STOCKMAR and Mercurius to my successor, I went on a three-month sabbatical. The key questions I wanted to reflect on were: Is my relationship with Neuguss ended? And what relationship can I continue to have with Neuguss? While considering these questions, I looked back and found that my relationship with Neuguss, which has seen many changes, was shaped time and again by people who confronted me at the right moment and worked with me on the questions I had: How can I be community-minded, and how can I become better for the world? At the end of my sabbatical I returned to Neuguss with pleasure – in the knowledge that I would find both the right people and right responsibilities there for my onward professional path.

What was the original impetus behind Neuguss?

Alfred Rexroth and his wife came up with the founding idea for Neuguss based on the observations of Rudolf Steiner, who coined the term “neutralisation of capital”. The goal with Neuguss was to create a platform for developing skills, with a view to accompanying and developing enterprises that are self-owned and managed by trustees in the owner role.

With a work approach built on the “threefolding of the social organism”, it represents an intention to create entities of in-company and inter-company self-management and collaboration, within which employees and the management team work together on the basis of equal rights, while maintaining areas of responsibility and expertise.

The economy can only be supplied with the necessary pioneering ideas and skills it needs to flourish if gifting processes that enable a free cultural and spiritual life are in place to a sufficient extent.

What special features arise in this approach to “doing business economics differently”?

With the integration of GLS Treuhand, Neuguss achieves a balance of interests between the legitimate social and economic demands of our time.

Through proactive public relations work, Neuguss partners with other companies and institutions that shape culture. These include schools, agricultural enterprises, special needs education organisations, universities, GLS Treuhand, and others.

• We promote “dance floors” as spaces for people in our enterprises to encounter one another, and also interact with people from other organisations and cultures.
• We encourage the development of our work community, relationship community, and knowledge community within the company and in the wider world.
• We shape the social scope between the poles of power and trust by means of agreements between the people involved.
• We enable a free education that is not influenced by economic interests.
• We understand work as a human need for dignified and meaningful employment that can neither be paid for nor “bought”. Remuneration facilitates subsistence.

Together with the Neuguss enterprises, universities, and other establishments, we develop collaborative ways of working and strategies that include education and entrepreneurial responsibility for everyone, and which are intended to promote collective action for the benefit of all.

What does “aesthetic company management” mean in this context?

A company’s responsibility primarily concentrates on two areas of activity: stabilising and dynamising. Stabilising tasks include various areas of business administration such as serving the market, maintaining market share, monitoring product quality, maintaining technical production equipment, and education and training of staff. Dynamising tasks relate to shaping the future, and this link to the future makes them an important task – perhaps the most important task the company faces. It also incorporates the ability to integrate societal and cultural, political, technical, economic, and monetary developments. Any bias in decision-making is a threat to a company or organisation’s existence and survival.

Aesthetic company management and development is a way of engaging with the future by putting a company’s own situation into the development model. The development of the model during quantitative change of certain factors becomes the object of quality development here.

The entire subject of this anniversary portal is relationships. How is a relationship successful?

Heat, love and light are the basics for any good relationship. Only with these is it possible to sustain a living relationship with me and my contemporaries. The recovery of economic life takes place when we work with the six remedies, and use them to reinvigorate economic life. Only when the company succeeds in permanently working to improve our ability to maintain relationships will we be able to rise to the challenges of global economic activity at human scale.