In my last presentation, standing in front of quite an audience, I again asked the question: Who in this room uses Wikipedia? Every finger went up in the air – there was not a single person in the room who does not use it! Wikipedia has grown to be a very important factor. The world can no longer be imagined without Wikipedia.

In Wikipedia, so you would believe, you will find everything. After all, the number of words available in Wikipedia is several times higher than that found in any other encyclopaedia.  Of course, even Wikipedia cannot contain everything. Once in a while, you discover relevant cultural assets that cannot be found in Wikipedia. Basically, it would be our duty as citizens to support the creation of the missing articles.

Wikipedia changes the world. Techniques and terms you cannot find or will only find poorly described will get less and less important. If some innovative concept has not been described in Wikipedia, it will hardly stand a chance of developing into something significant.

Thanks to the democratic structure of Wikipedia, this phenomenon is mostly self-regulative. There is a functioning democratic control mechanism. And, of course, the representatives of all areas of expertise know that their knowledge had better get into Wikipedia if they want to remain relevant. Because technologies and cultures described in Wikipedia, as well as persons and social systems, gain new meaning.

But Wikipedia faces a massive threat!

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In this series, I will comment on the written feedback I received after my presentation. Also, I will answer the online questions asked by students I had no time to amply reply to during said presentation.

Lehren für Unternehmensführer – das Leben, das Wissen, die Informatik und die Ethik

„Innovative Entrepreneurs“/ Summer Semester 2010
Leadership in growth-oriented enterprises

Today: Responsibility for Employees

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In this series, I will comment on the written feedback I received after my presentation. Also, I will answer the online questions asked by students I had no time to amply reply to during said presentation

Lehren für Unternehmensführer – das Leben, das Wissen, die Informatik und die Ethik

(Life, Knowledge, Computer Science and Ethics)

„Innovative Entrepreneurs“/ Summer Semester 2010
Leadership in growth-oriented enterprises

Today: InterFace AG

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Currently, the number of graduates annually leaving Chinese universities is six million. Most of them have a degree in one of the natural sciences.

Regardless of the current boom, China only needs three million of them. The rest do not find an “adequate” job. So what do the other three million each year do? Do they drive taxies or work as chauffeurs? Or do they sell Hamburgers at MacDonalds?

It does not sound good to me.

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A cordial welcome to Alfred Doll as a new IF blog author!

After having studied informatics, Alfred Doll worked in various leading positions. We understand each other quite well. He, too, is a student of Rupert Lay.

He has been dealing with value-oriented management for many years now. Seven years ago, he opened his own consulting institute.

Alfred Doll travels a lot and shares his experience as an entrepreneur and director in philosophy-oriented communication and leadership seminars with his audience. He is personally acquainted with many leaders.
He also often gives presentations and publishes on sustainability, responsibility, leadership dialectics, corporate social responsibility and value-oriented management.

We already published one of his well-written articles. I look forward to our future cooperation.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

Rupert Lay was my mentor during many years of my life. As I see it, he was the most important of all my teachers. The first seminar of his I attended was in the spring of 1983, around the time of year we are now again in. For me, it was a totally new experience. Meeting him meant quite a fundamental change to my life.

When I was younger, my attitude towards seminars for personality promotion – as they were still called at the time – was a rather sceptical one. In 1980, I was lucky enough to attend a great seminar with Herr Uhlenbrock of TPM (Training Psychologisches Management) when I was working for Softlab. That took care of my scepticism.

In 1983, I attended a seminar by Rupert Lay. At the time, he was a Jesuit priest and the nestor for “Ethics and Management”. For us, he was discovered by Peter Schnupp, one of the Softlab founders. By chance, there was a vacancy for me in one of Rupert Lay’s seminars. Rupert was a celebrity! His seminars were extremely expensive and yet always full.

His three-day seminar was scheduled to take place at a rather less-than-friendly hotel near Frankfurt airport. The seminar was to start early in the afternoon. Having arrived with time to spare, I sat down in front of the hotel, enjoyed the spring sunshine and watched the people come and go. Also, I wondered what was to come next.

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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 (66) – 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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