About

The Blog The Care Guys is the place where Heinz Landau and Stephan Polomski invite you to communicate on personal leadership experiences. Out of our experience we explore how humanistic and humanitarian principles influence leadership, management, marketing and human resources positively just by taking care!


A Non-Commercial Forum for Sharing Experiences on Caring Leadership – Authentic, True and Personal

Why do we emphasize the leadership experience more than leadership theory? We are convinced, that you cannot learn how to lead by reading a book. In order to become a good or excellent leader you need to learn through experience. And experience is the most valuable thing to share. Combined with academic theory it becomes true knowledge and sometimes wisdom.

And, because experience depends on personalities, the blogs written by different people will offer different approaches to caring leadership experiences. There are always different approaches – different interpretations of what caring leadership is.

At the same time, we like to point out that our blog is non-commercial and non-profit. This is the reason why we keep this site advertising free and so that it remains a friendly place to visit.


How Do We Understand Caring Leadership?

If you do business for the sake of business you will not reach the level of caring leadership. Lao-Ze said: The purpose of life is not to gain things, but things are there for people to gain life. This saying is very crucial to understand what caring leadership really means. Of course, as leaders, we have to make money to secure existence and in the best case wealth. Decisions can be hard to make, however, money is a matter-of-fact. It is cold. And a beating heart is motivated only with positive, warming emotions, and every heart is motivated in a different way.

That means, the task is to create a vision or purpose greater than just money – and this means to give meaning when leading, a meaning for life.


How Did the Idea Emerge?

We – that is Heinz Landau and Stephan Polomski – met in 2001. At that time Heinz was Chairman and Managing Director of Merck Ltd., Thailand and Stephan was a management intern working on a project entitled “Employer Branding”. During this project, Heinz and Stephan re-positioned the company on the notion of “care” using the 4-stakeholder-approach.

Today, Heinz is Senior Advisor of B. Grimm Co. and Stephan is HR director of a telematic and multimedia company in the automotive industry in South Germany.

In 2001, their working hypothesis is, that leadership can be more successful in business when it obeys humanistic and humanitarian principles. At the same time, leadership should balance the interests of the four most important stakeholder groups of a company: customers, employees, owners, and society. Success in the eyes of Heinz and Stephan meant creating more economic value and simulaneously more happiness for all stakeholders.

On the one hand, Heinz, his management team, and the employees of Merck Ltd., Thailand were producing double digit growth for years satisfying all stakeholders impressively. On the other hand, a unique program on corporate social responsibility was initiated. It demonstrated that leadership can effectively post emotional landmarks in a tough and cold economical world.

The stakeholders of Merck Ltd., Thailand experienced that by giving and by sharing you always get back more in return, even though you might not count and measure it.


What Was the Outcome?

Hence, Merck Ltd., Thailand was widely recognized and acknowledged. The corporate brand of Merck Ltd., Thailand is seen as a unique experience in the pharmaceutical and chemical business in Thailand. The company was identified as a leader in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility by the Thai Ministry of Social Development and ranked among the top four companies in the country. Merck Ltd., Thailand won the Regional Leadership Excellence Award in the Asia Regional Competition. And last but not least, within the Merck Group itself, Merck Ltd., Thailand is perceived as the “gold standard” in Corporate Social Responsibility.


What Is Our Intention?

At the moment, we are two people. We are going to explore our topic with guest authors, whom we happily invite, and our blogging visitors. We will discuss and share our experience of how care influences leadership, management, marketing, human resources and corporate social responsibility.

The care-experience that Heinz and Stephan initiated at Merck Ltd., Thailand clearly showed that for effective leadership, a defined set of values and moral principles is necessary. This is how you build things that last, and hopefully these things will benefit generations. And it all starts with care itself. When we are leading with care we do that in all possible perspectives of business.

For this blog, we have chosen several categories we find crucial and worthwhile to be discussed in deptht when we are talking about caring leadership. At the same time, these categories signify our core competencies in which we will share our experience (and less our academic knowledge).

These categories are:

  • LEADERSHIP
  • MANAGEMENT
  • MARKETING
  • HUMAN RESOURCES
  • CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Care is the red thread connecting these 5 dots or categories.

Just imagine 5 orange colored columns carrying the roof of a company´s success. Imagine that these 5 columns solid as they are, are linked with a green, light, flexible and vivid ribbon, giving them more than functional identity, but meaning too.

And this green ribbon is “care”, and care stands for life.

Enjoy reading and blogging with us! – Take care!