In her presentation about “Open Innovation” at IF Forum in our Unterhaching office building, Frau Professor Dr. Möslein recommended a paper written by  Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Peter Mertens. In the article, he compares the job of a university teacher with the challenges a decathlete has to face.

She sent us the article and we are permitted to publish it. It is certainly worth reading. So you can download and read it here.

Der Zehnkampf des Hochschullehrers (24) – Setzen wir falsche Anreize?

I think managers and entrepreneurs are sort of decathletes, anyway.

RMD

The idea of originality is dead. It has been dead since the German Romanticists.
 Even exceptional achievements of the human intellect can be traced back to forerunners. Mind you, they do not get worse by this, but they are no longer original in the sense of the genius metaphor.

However, new ideas and solutions are always an option. Incidentally, they are just a function of time and effort. Talent is of secondary importance.

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After graduating from high school, you simply have to go abroad. It would be best if you spent a semester somewhere as an exchange student. It is the only way you can learn to cope with the challenges you will be facing as a manager or entrepreneur in our globalized world.

This is the kind of advice I hear “experienced managers” give young people during various events. To me, that seems a little one-sided. If young people go abroad, the basic objective is not for them to become better managers. Rather, they should get a little experience in life and gain a little wisdom. To be sure, this is not bad news for a future manager, either.

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„Open Worlds“ is what our IF forum of the year 2010 will be about. That is why we chose OPEN2010 as headline and tag. We plan to invite three women as speakers. All of them are quite familiar with science, business and society.

As our first guest, on Tuesday, March, 2nd, 2010, we will welcome Frau Professor Dr. Kathrin M. Möslein in the office building of InterFace AG at Unterhaching.

She will start with a presentation on:

Open Innovation – On the Way to a Take-Part Science!

Open Innovation describes innovative processes that do not end at the borderlines of enterprises or innovation departments. Instead, they include agents independent from their institutional affiliation as fathers of ideas, developers of concepts, or appliers of innovations when it comes to the realization of said innovations.

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Last week I was busy doing some advanced training at RISE. The Zürich workshop was about:

Exploring Executive Value Creation and How It Can Be Learned

We were discussing questions such as:

What is the potential contribution of the “CEO” towards the success of the enterprise?

or

What is the value contribution of the management at the top of the enterprise?

This is a question I have been thinking about fore many years. Of course, I want to do a good job for my enterprise. But how can I evaluate that? Can I measure my own achievement?

Here is a short report:

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Between January of 1965 and April of 1970, destruction rained down on Vietnam. Statistics mention about 45 million tons of the herbicide Agent Orange, used for leaf stripping. They contained about 300 kilograms of Tetrachlordibenzodioxine (for reference: the Seveso catastrophe contained about 1.5 kilograms of it).

Here is how Francis Van Hoi described it:

“A few hundred metres behind our house, there were dense rain forests. We often played there when we were children. One morning, the trees had all lost their leaves. We went further into the (former) forest than ever before, collected firewood and fish in waterholes that had been unknown to us.  We were glad to find enough firewood and food for a change… “.

Today, more than one million handicapped children and adolescents suffer from the after-effects of the poison.

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In 1995, Francis Van Hoi founded an educational centre of professional learning in Ba Thong, Hoc Mon, near Saigon. In co-operation with a mission of the Don Bosco Salesians – where he himself went to school more than 40 years ago – the centre initially provided an education in the crafts for 10 street children. By now, the number has increased to between 20 and 30 each semester. We are talking between two and six months during which the young people are to be enabled to go home and work for their own livelihoods. In Vietnam, too, accommodation, food and education cost money, regardless of the support by the Salesians.

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Parlour games are “en vogue”. There are new ones all the time, and each year one game is awarded the title “game of the year”.

When I was a child, we played “aggravation or frustration”, “nine men’s morns”, “checkers”, “Chinese checkers” and chess. There were also really stupid board games (car and horse races) with really nice figures but they were so boring that we only ever played them once.

And we had the classics, such as monopoly, later risk or clue. Those are really emotional games, requiring stamina and patience, sometimes even combinatory talent. Then came the huge inflation by entertainment games. I opted out and refused to play those new games.

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The Council for the Prosecution is always happy if once in a while he does not have to deal with crimes and other offences. And that is exactly how the communication advisor feels about PowerPoint. An excellent idea, namely to upgrade presentation with graphics, has been realized in a criminally unworthy way, and that hurts. However, we get really enthusiastic as soon as a coach manages to take a team with him on a new, creative and successful path.

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