Nestled between the two hills of Rosenberg and Freudenberg, the city of St. Gallen was the center of the global embroidery industry until the First World War and, with 18% of exports, a key pillar of the Swiss economy at the time. In the course of the growth of the economy and the city due to the embroidery boom, on May 25, 1898, the Great Council of the Canton of St. Gallen decided to found the then Commercial Academy (later the College of Commerce, the University of St. Gallen and today’s University of St. Gallen).

Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich, founder of the St. Gallen Institute of Business Administration (IfB), was the driving force behind the development of the commercial college into the university and later the University of St. Gallen. In his research work and reflections, he dealt intensively with the requirements of modern management theory. Appointed professor at St. Gallen in 1954, he recognized early on the importance of holistic, integrated corporate management as a distinguishing feature between successful and unsuccessful companies. His declared aim was to develop pragmatic orientation and application aids for students and managers, which are not to be understood as recipes, but rather offer thought maps and navigation tools that help managers to make better and more sustainable decisions and thus to manage the company better even in uncertain times.

The “St. Gallen Management Model” developed by him and his colleagues, first described in 1968 in his work “The Company as a Productive Social System”, offered such a frame of reference that enables multidimensional leadership. The idea of thinking in systems, of turning business objects into dynamically acting subjects, integrated into a multi-layered environment, was revolutionary in the understanding of management at the time. This integration of systems theory and cybernetics (cybernetikos – ancient Greek for controller) into traditional business management opened up a new way of dealing with complexity: Instead of responding to every measurable imbalance in the company with a tool from the ubiquitous standard toolbox of classical business administration and management theory in a targeted and singular way, Ulrich’s “St. Gallen Management Model” captures the complexity of the social system “enterprise”, assigns roles to the individual stakeholders and recognizes the interdependence with the outside world. This is the often cited holistic approach of the St. Gallen School. The multidimensional approach offers a conceptual design framework, a “blank canvas for meaningful things” (Prof. Ulrich), with which managers can identify and solve problems themselves thanks to better knowledge of the overall context.

Further development

Ulrich’s successor in St. Gallen, Professor Knut Bleicher, continued the work on thinking in systems (or wholes, as Ulrich called it) and deepened the St. Gallen approach in 1991 in his standard work “The concept of integrated management”. Knut Bleicher’s aim was to go beyond Ulrich’s St. Gallen Management Model and provide today’s managers with a concept to guide their thinking in order to think through key management problems in a structured way and combine them into an integrative overall concept. Particularly in today’s global environment and the associated complexity in the company in its dependence on global changes, the number of parameters that determine success and failure in their interdependence is increasing. A single person, especially in larger companies, is no longer able to absorb and manage this interactive diversity. However, in his “Concept of Integrated Management”, Bleicher shows which levers can at least be used to untangle and influence the interdependencies of the social system “company”. He refers to the findings of Hans Ulrich and uses them to develop a timeless, flexible response to an increasingly complex world. This is also shown by the further editions of his work published from 2011 onwards, which were first supplemented and expanded by an additional new chapter on the practical implementation of the “Concept of Integrated Management” by Dr. Christian Abegglen, then Managing Director of the St. Gallen Business School, and then culminated in a new edition as part of a thorough revision.

Thanks to Knut Bleicher’s very early realization, most recently during his time as Academic Director at St. Gallen Business School, that a company should see itself as part of a virtual network, the “Integrated Concept” can justifiably still be regarded as a central pillar of a holistic understanding of management and thus also as a standard of modern management teaching in the German-speaking world. It is also rightly regarded as a pioneer of a modern understanding of leadership – of leadership in high-performance networks, of leadership through the communication of meaning, vision and values. It also represents a deliberate counterpoint to the rather one-dimensional management thinking often observed in Anglo-American countries in particular.

Over the past 25 years since its first publication, the concept has been constantly put to the test in practice, adapted and given concrete form suitable for implementation. The “Integrated Concept” therefore offers today – just as it did over 25 years ago – a suitable reference architecture for presenting and solving business issues and can rightly be described as highly adaptable.

In the 9th edition, which was published in July 2017 under the editorship of Christian Abegglen, special attention was paid to the topic of implementing the concept in practice, such as questions of modern management in digital times, in line with the aforementioned developments. The knowledge navigator developed by Christian Abegglen helps with application, reference, cross-reading and implementation from theory to practice. Working papers, charts, roadmaps, instructions and vouchers are available digitally exclusively for readers of this 9th edition.

The St. Gallen Business School owes its exceptional reputation to the visionary power of Professors Ulrich and Bleicher as well as the unique innovative power of Pipp and its managing directors to put this thinking into practice with a variety of unique programs. As always, however, it takes the best at the venue: the top-class lecturers at St. Gallen Business School, who make every seminar a very special experience.

On this basis, independent, privately organized institutions, not only within the St. Gallen Group of Business Schools, emerged alongside the state-run University of St. Gallen, which spread the knowledge and name of St. Gallen throughout the world. Thanks to this competitive diversity of seminar and consulting companies, St. Gallen has today become a “Management Valley” – as predicted and postulated by Ulrich – with correspondingly great economic significance. The coexistence of university, university of applied sciences, private business schools and management centers as well as management consultants today leads to a fruitful diversity of knowledge dissemination and transfer in the tradition of system-oriented, holistic and integrated St. Gallen management theory. Competition between providers leads to a striving for maximum quality, customer orientation and, as a result, very high customer satisfaction.