When Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a global IT – services firm, published last year his book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down”, it caused quite a stir. Nayar’s mantra seems to reverse conventional business beliefs. In many companies, customer need is placed above all others – often at the sacrifice [...]

Do you know this impression: Wow, this young guy or girl is full of power, ambition, brightness, and confidence? Did you ask yourself the question: How can I lead and develop this agglomeration of energy and intelligence? And further: What do I do as a leader in order to integrate this – may be rules [...]

Success in life depends on our ability to keep learning. That is true for students as well as for managers. Therefore, it is astonishing how few people seem to have embraced the idea of being a true learning person. I am observing again and again that employees and managers are stuck in day to day [...]

How do I care for myself in the role of a manager when the structural framework is extremely demanding for me? Most managers will skip this question and switch over to how do I respond to expectations and how do I function even more and better?
Maximizing performance and numbing failure, this is what often leads [...]

How many times a day are you talking to another person like your boss, your subordinate, a friend, a relative or another person and you notice that your conversation partner is not really present when you speak? He is physically present, but he doesn’t pay much attention to what you say. Take a minute and [...]

I recently listened to an interview with Thomas Sattelberger, Member of the Board and responsible for Human Resources (HR) at Deutsche Telekom, a German Dax 30 company. When Sattelberger, one of Germany’s most respected experts and practitioners in the field of HR, was asked about the main HR trend for 2011, he pointed out that [...]

Last week when I attended an HR conference in Frankfurt we had dinner in one of the in-places of town. Coincidentally one of Frankfurt´s private banking houses was celebrating Christmas there as well. Listening to speeches and talks, one assumes that power, wealth, and prestige are the most influential motivation drivers managers follow during their [...]

For my work and approach how to deal with change as a manager and head of human resources I found a philosophy of five genuine principles. These principles are my personal working charter. They reflect how to make change a positive experience for employees and all other stakeholders, apart from demands for a tool kit [...]

Last month, I was one among four speakers at Dataconsult’s Thailand Regional Forum. The statements of all speakers pointed unanimously in the same direction: succession planning is a strategic issue that is absolutely  critical for the continuous  business  success of a company. Nevertheless, research indicates that about half of companies do not have a succession [...]

Private jet? Yacht? Castles? This multi-millionaire had them all, and much more…
What’s so surprising? It is that the gentleman, Herbert von Karajan, was an orchestra conductor, and such a job – although it is glamorous- does not pay much usually.
Karajan passed away at 81, and his obituary in The New York Times described him as [...]

These days I conducted job interviews for a middle ranked management position and one of the candidates was a young German of Indian origin – smart, structured, straight forward, with excellent social skills and high ambitions – basically someone you would hire on the spot for a middle management position. Although I knew that my [...]

Leaders who possess strong soft skills perform better at driving hard results while executives with weak interpersonal skills were rated poorly on their ability to deliver good financial results, especially over time, and received predictably poor ratings as people managers. These are key findings from a study by U.S. organizational consulting firm Green Peak Partners [...]