Again, I spent half of my weekend with my studies of Real Estate Investment Banking. In the lecture about Exit Strategies (for real estate investors) the excellent tutor managed to keep us awake during this wonderful summery Saturday afternoon when he asked the question “Who of you works in a company that does have a […]

Britain’s Barclays bank and ABN Amro, Netherlands largest bank, have announced their intention to merge.
Well, in the next couple of weeks we have to expect a number of analysis and comments that agree with this merger and that forecast a wave of similar mergers between banks in Europe. But let’s go back to business…
The competition […]

The Financial Times starts to become a priceless source of ever new food for thought for me. Many of the ideas seem so obvious when I read them, but they never crossed my mind.
Today Victor Mallet comments on the “new timelords of global business”. His point is that with the weight of global power moving […]

What distinguishes an “average product” from a “high class product” or service? Robert Reppa and Evan Hirsch (2007) argue that superb service is the crucial ingredient of successful high-end brands. In their previous article “The Luxury touch” REPPA and HIRSCH present four major principles to deliver customer satisfaction year after year.

Luxury brand companies establish a […]

We all come across various pieces of news and information every day. Most of them don’t get our attention, taken on their own. However, sometimes two seemingly unrelated pieces of information team up in our minds and suddenly become more interesting.
This just happened to me. Last weekend, during my course of Real Estate Investment Banking, […]

Today we have very good weather conditions in Germany. Very sunny, no clouds and the temperatures have been up to 28 degrees (82,4 F). Hence we decided to open the new barbecue season.

During the research stage for my PhD thesis I found a very interesting article by BAH (Booz Allen Hamilton). It focuses on the US auto finance industry and discusses the challenges for market players, which arrive from different industry forces, e.g. falling credit ratings for major OEMs. This article was written in 2004; however some […]

During Eastern we made a short trip to Berlin. Hence we would like to illustrate our impressions; of couse we would like to offer some recommendations.

(Berlin Mitte, next to Berlin cathedral)

Our recommendations:

Accommodation: Swisssotel - This hotel offers excellent service. It is located next to Berlin’s famous shopping street, the “Ku’ damm” (offical name of the […]

Recently I have started to analyse the options to “upgrade” my analogue SLR camera. To be more precisely: to buy a digital SLR camera. Actually that should be a simple decision. We have a Minolta SLR (Dynax 700 SI) that we bought in Canada more than a decade ago. Over time we have added some accessories […]