Well, there are number of personal attributes I really appreciate. Precision, focus, commitment and self-motivation are some of them. But there is another one, no matter for what type of business you are working for: A good sense of humor. The next video features a very important person who had an impact on all our [...]

So far I have resisted the wish to comment about the ongoing sub-prime and financial crisis on this blog. I surely have an opinion about all this. However, so much has been written in this matter – analyses, comments, reports, more analyses, readers comment etc. I agree with many of them and disagree with others. [...]

This is a toaster with a design made by Porsche. It’s sort of weird, but this device was object of a question during the Porsche’s Annual General Meeting, the world famous German sports car maker. A couple of days ago the Annual General Meeting of Porsche took place. It was a good example that understanding [...]

There are bad news from the financial sector wherever you look these days. Here are just two headlines from the last couple of days: Worldwide financial job losses triple in 2007 – Almost 200,000 staff are laid off (FT, 18 January 2008) Crisis talks for West LB – about one third of the current staff [...]

In this post I would like to discuss some aspects of innovation. In doing so I will start with a definition; after this I will present some aspects that organizations should consider when focus on innovation. Term. The term innovation puts an emphasis on the first time business application of discoveries (business application here means [...]

A couple of days ago (see this post) I had assumed that the financial reports of the fourth quarter would present new cumulative value adjustments. Yesterday Citigroup announced its financial results. Due to writedowns of $ 18.1 billion in the business segments subprime mortgage and increased losses in the segment consumer loans the loss is [...]

Due to the so called subprime crisis a large number of banks had to make heavy cumulative value adjustments in the third quarter 2007. The ultimate cause for this crisis was credit default related problems with sub-prime loans for house financing (mortgages) in the US. New stresses and strains seem to be occurring for the [...]

My morning reading of the German newspaper FAZ really gave me a happy start into the day. I read an article about the weak stock quotes of the large investment firms like Blackstone or Fortress. There I found this sentence “In the view of increasing defaults of corporate loans, a new heyday is expected for [...]

DVD business is one the biggest profit makers in Hollywood. Taking this issue into consideration it easy to see why movie makers of the big media companies (e.g. Time Warner, News Corp., and NBC Universal) can be very happy now. The long term “format war” between blu-ray and HD DVD has come to an end. [...]

According to various management journals, management speeches, and scientific studies we know that employees can be one important source for innovation, corporate value and competitive advantages. Hence it is very easy to find a number of publications “how to motivate” and “how to manage” (your staff). Well I won’t discuss the question whether it is [...]