1 Executive Retreat® is managed single handedly by its founder, Jan Tkaczow – former top executive, manager, entrepreneur, leader of large organizations and teams, currently consultant and psychoanalyst.

Here’s how he introduces himself: my name might sound familiar – I have intensively operated in business for 20 years, occupying various high ranking positions similar to those held by my clients. I have experienced the challenge and stresses which are inevitably connected to the everyday routine of a top executive with major responsibilities. I have gained my experience in business throughout the stormy 1990s and have undertaken different forms of entrepreneurship until the end of the last decade. It is worth saying that I have achieved not only great successes, but also suffered painful defeats. Understanding what a mechanism of defeat, rooted in our self, consists in – is the key to success.

At present I’m a psychoanalyst. How did that happen? Well, still during my business career I lived under such pressure that I needed to find somebody to talk to about it. There was no 1 Executive Retreat® back then, so, by chance, I ended up in psychoanalytic consulting room. It quickly turned out that psychoanalysis answers the most important questions in our lives. Need transformed into interest, interest into passion, and passion into desire at the end. After a few years of going to Paris for my analysis (Warsaw’s offer was insufficient for further study) I have dropped my business career and become fully-fledged Lacanian psychoanalyst.

For years, I have contemplated how to connect analysis – which is unmatched in pursuing the experience of truth acquired in difficult, lengthy and tiring process, which very few can or are able to undertake – with business. It is not a piece of cake. There is an established opinion prevailing within analytical circles that it cannot be done. Well, it seems that it was not for nothing that I have stubbornly lead and developed – being a medical doctor by education – my business career in fields completely disconnected from medicine, following always the same rule: ‘Those who think something can’t be done should not disturb those who are actually doing it’. I have found a solution once again: 1 Executive Retreat®

It is a unique solution, which renders it possible for the analytical approach, with its intangible knowledge, to solve problems in business. It uses psychoanalytical technique to grasp what position the subject holds with regard to business problems and what the outcome of that shall be.  

I was the CEO for large companies, I was a member of Boards; business doesn’t hold any secrets for me. It became predictable when I realized what the true matter of our lives is. It is equally clear to me that not everybody has such a profound and irresistible desire to deal with ‘incomprehensible’ in one’s life to undergo analysis. 1 Executive Retreat® answers this. The businessman, businesswoman, leader, entrepreneur, needs something different than common psychotherapy; I know, because I understand the requirement of efficiency stipulated as a goal in business. Understanding the goal of efficiency is key element in understanding the subject’s position in his or her personal and professional life. 1 Executive Retreat® sets the base for this. In business there’s but one requirement: effectiveness and delivering expected – or better – results. In 1 Executive Retreat® we care exclusively for our project to be effective. Not learning, not developing, not pleasant, not leading, not providing new knowledge, not working out new positions, not providing different angles of view, not giving an evaluation of one’s brand as a leader, and so on. These are all nice objectives. If they happen along the way – you’re welcome. However, our project must be, first and foremost, effective and operative in terms which are important, meaningful and significant to you. We don’t replace them with some more-or-less modern and trendy buzz words, created over and over again by different management gurus. In the end, we’re not there to create a new theory or to implement an old one. No. We meet to effectively solve the problem. Your problem. 1 EXECUTIVE RETREAT® project brings to the light of day things you know, but cannot grasp, because they are hidden in an inaccessible area, which we call the unconscious.

In 1 ER® Business we deal exclusively with problems of the highest importance and involving top-level management. The problem which we wish to deal with must conjoin politics, psychology, leadership theory, philosophy in itself, i.e. it must be properly complicated and opaque to the stakeholders. It cannot be just another business problem. Of course – that’s where it stems from, but we don’t take projects which consist in adding two plus two. Even if this ‘two plus two’ takes a few megabytes in Excel with PivotTables – this can be bought in BCG or PwC. But… But if on the basis of such an Excel item there emerge different opinions, insoluble discussions, conflicts, impasses – oh, yes! That is the subject for 1 Executive Retreat®!