Each year, I receive many Christmas and New Year’s Greetings, both electronically and via snail mail as postcards. It is always my true delight to read them all. Some of them are of a very personal nature, but some of them are truly original.
This article is about a very special New Year’s Greeting by Matthias Bodry. In 1989, Matthias Bodry founded Bytec – and he is still managing director of the company today.
Before he started Bytec, he was an engineer in a machine construction enterprise for IT and as such one of our first CLOU/HIT users. In those days, we often called each other and I received plenty of precious comments from him. He was one of those customers who were both critical and constructive, thus helping us with their comments towards improving HIT-CLOU – without which the products would never have become such a huge success.
Matthias Bodry remained true to himself as a human being and entrepreneur. Over the years, he always kept his enterprise successfully on course and independent. To me, he is a fellow entrepreneur whom I respect very much, indeed!
Consequently, there is a space reserved for him in my personal hall of fame. In his Christmas Greetings, Matthias Bodry says exactly what I feel.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
Here are his Christmas Greetings:
Christmas and New Year’s Greetings 2010/2011 by Matthias Bodry, managing director of Bytec, to his customers, partners and friends:
Christmas is the time of contemplation.
After all those years, I realize that the most important thing
I learned
when I studied machine engineering was
what
Prof. Dr.-Ing. H.-J. Warnecke taught us:
“You can have three kinds of relationship with a bank.
Either you take your money there and become their customer.
Or you borrow money and become their debtor.
If you borrow plenty of money, you will turn partner.
The second relationship is the one you should avoid”.
The last few years showed how important it is
to stick by this rule. However,
there were
quite a few students among us who asked themselves
what has that got to do with machine engineering?
Well, this shows that curricula and teaching their content
does not automatically mean education.
Modern times created a new relationship with banks:
“You borrow even a lot more than that
so eventually the bank is yours”.
The governments of this world
have positive experience with this relationship.
Perhaps the Christmas Season will give them some time
to come up with an idea about how to skip the
second relationship and directly acquire their own bank.
Matthias Body
Managing Director
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