I had an Auris experience yesterday which made me revisit my old post about the Auris advertising campaign in Germany in February. My little experience is definitely not representative for what is going on on Germany’s roads, since I haven’t been using my car very much over the last couple of months. However, yesterday’s strike […]

Early indicators are very popular in the business world. People normally like them because they see a lot of advantages, such as

Early indicators are perceived to provide some objectivity to otherwise fuzzy planning and forecasting processes.
They are most often based on external data, ideally from an institution with a very high reputation. That adds even […]

I just came across an interesting new project, called “European Smart Cities”. It is a ranking of European Cities with populations under 500,000, developed by Scientists from the Technical University (TU) of Vienna in cooperation with the University of Ljubljana and the TU of Delft.
Well, yes, this is one more city ranking and there already […]

Last week I had written about some of my experiences with strategic planning meetings – the pro’s and con’s, what can go wrong and how to avoid some of the problems. However, the process is not over the moment the meeting ends and everybody leaves the room. Even if the meeting was considered a great […]

Strategic planning meetings are a very controversial thing. They have a bit of a reputation to be just another fancy management trend. I have to admit that I, too, have my doubts if all of these meetings are worth the efforts. My experience tells me that there is much truth in Brian Quinn’s famous quote:
“A […]

If you just wondered what on earth ‚Evonik’ might be, I have already brought my message across.
Evonik is the brand-new name of a very old German industrial group, formerly known as Ruhrkohle AG. Ruhrkole AG, or briefly RAG, has just separated its activities into two different businesses: the mining business will remain branded as RAG. […]

I discovered it only today: Yesterday, the same day as Tobias Bayer’s article “For they know not what they do” in Financial Times Deutschland, there was a comment with a similar message in Financial Times: John Kay – “The same old folly starts a new spiral of risk” (available on his website).
John also says that […]

Actually, this is not exactly the question I want to answer with this post. It is borrowed from an article in today’s Financial Times Deutschland, which is titled “For they know not what they do”. Author Tobias Bayer looks at the latest bank-failures (or better almost-failures) in Germany and presents some surprisingly simple explanations:
At first, […]

A word in advance: I have no idea if this is a special German phenomenon or if these parties are popular in other countries too.
There is a concept called “Ü-30 Party” (an abbreviation from “Über 30”, roughly translated as 30-something party) here in Germany for about a decade. These are parties that are targeted at […]

In his last post, Oliver has discussed various aspects of the language of strategy with a focus on strategic conversations and strategic discussions. This reminds me of a more practical problem I experienced quite often. The language of strategy is full of specific terminology. Most people know these terms (you can hardly not know them […]