People

Mr. Oetringer learned the techniques from the culture that Ross Perot, former US presidential candidate, had established at his IT services company, EDS. In this culture, unsolved problems were not an option. Their root causes had to be identified and solved once and for all. Innovation, value creation, happy clients and motivated employees were integral to the culture.

When Perot had left and IT became highly complex, best practices were implemented to manage complexity. What nobody realized at the time was that the old culture got lost. Following best practices became more important than solving tough problems and keeping clients happy. The once-prospering EDS turned into a company with ongoing cost-savings projects. In this situation, Eugen Oetringer became one of a few employees who were re-applying the old culture. This turned out to work amazingly well. At EDS, the results he achieved earned him a nomination to became an EDS Fellow (30 positions amongst 129,000 employees).

Whether the challenge concerned internal communications, yearly cost-savings projects, compliance needs, IT, the health services system or mental matters like ADHD and dyslexia in his family, it turned out that the root causes of insufficient results were pretty much the same. In turn, they provided guidance towards simple solutions. The ADHD and dyslexia results were astonishing: Daily ADHD-outbursts have disappeared for 15 years. After years of intensive training to learn how to read, his son learned it within six weeks. It turned out many others had found similar results and that the working principle of treatments is explainable through the law of nature hiding behind #FlattenTheCurve (see COVID).