Personal & Professional Experiences & Insights

Hi everybody. Welcome back to my blog again. Today I would like to give You some insights into the experiences which I have made during the last three months regarding my new business routine with working permanently in home office.  If somebody had told me in february this year, that I - the same as the grand majority of all our administrative and indirect employees - would soon no longer be able to work at my office in our factory in Itatiba and that I also would not be able to travel any more this year, without any doubts I would have immediately called an ambulance for taking him to hospital. But sometimes fiction turns into reality, as in the present Covid-19 case. And all this has happened almost overnight, without any prior notice, so that we were practically overwhelmed by the new circumstances and did not have a chance, to prepare ourselfes for what was coming and happening so quickly around and with us. Not too long ago, a situation like the one we have right now would have i

Hello again everybody. It makes fun, to see You all back here in my blog again. Lots of very motivating and interesting comments and questions have been coming from all over the world to my posts and I would like to share one of these with You first. Many of You have expressed their admiration for the easily detectable open culture and strong team spirit, which we have managed to establish within our company and one of You asked me, to comment more specifically, how I personally see the importance of diversity for modern teams and leadership and how we at Vulkan do Brasil deal with it in practice. I will answer this very nice and important question on ocasion of one of my future posts, because I have already chosen to give You some insights today on how I see and deal with the important topics globalisation and global supply chains.  We are right now in a time and under circumstances, where it seems to be fashion to declare the end of the globalisation, as we got to know it during the

Good morning everybody. Hope You have already enjoyed Your breakfast and are prepared for the tough ride, to which I will invite You now. Maybe the title of my today`s blog gave You already an early warning. Anyhow I`ll explain this now to You.  Since my early childhood - having lost my father at the age of six years, actually he died in hospital from a longer desease on December 24th, 1964 - I have been developping as an analytical, critical and often non conformist person and this had with a certain propability to a great extend to do with the circumstances of how, when and where I grew up. And young people anyhow, no matter the individual circumstances of their life, must master the challenge during their natural maturation process, to find the right way and means, to dosage their nonconformity behaviour and adapt it to the way of live they intend to start and develop. In my case the circumstances were ideal for nonconformity. It was the time of the "cold war", the US mili

Good to see You here again this morning! Thanks for so faithfully following my posts. For today I have chosen a subject, which really excites me and makes me very proud and happy. When I got freshly started as President of Vulkan do Brasil in Itatiba in September 2014, one of my first activities was, to get familiar with our product portfolio and to understand details about our products and their typical applications. Our engineers gave me theoretical training lessons und my colleagues in our factory showed me how we manufacture our different products. This gave me already a quite good background, but was still very theoretical. The real understanding, for which applications our products finally serve, came during several visits to customers in the different industries, which we typically attend.  You cannot imagine, how impressive it was for somebody as curious and generally interested in technology as me, to see with his own eyes a big open pit iron ore mine, an entire steel factory

Dear faithful readers and followers of my blog posts, looks like we could altogether meanwhile solve the initial technical problems and You can easily follow and subscribe my blog posts now by just typing klausfhepp.blogspot.com into the browser of Your smart device (fone, pad and/or computer) and entering Your email address in the menu window which You can open on the left upper side of my posts. Good news first for You! Our community is growing continuously and globally. We are many already and - and this is really overwhelming me - we are already present on all continents of this planet. Please permit me this romantic comment, but this is really "killing" me. I knew already, that I have friends, business partners and all other types of good contacts at many places, but I was deeply impressed, when Google Analytics showed me on the map of the globe, wherever You live. Wonderful. Today I selected a story and subject, which is fully personal and has nothing - directly - to do

Hello again, my faithful followers, readers, friends, business partners and all others. I must admit that our 1st week`s party for this blog has been fantastic last night and I am still recovering my strengths from it. But don`t worry, my NAI maschine functionning (explained in my post no 6 "Hot stuff" from june 23) was not effected negatively and we can thus proceed now with the full normal speed and quality (?) of my today`s post.  Today I wanted to show You in a very quick and fast ride, how I made my initial experience in doing business in Africa and how I`m feeling about this. In one of my earlier posts I already explained to You, that 5 years ago my colleague Arno Ett (Sales Director VDT Latam @ Vulkan do Brasil) and I had started to follow the historical example of the brazilian bandeirantes (a mixture of explorers and adventurers, which discovered the deep interior of the state of Sao Paulo about two centuries ago from out of the at that time few cities close to the b

Welcome back here in my blog.  For my today`s post I have foreseen to give You some insights, how I made experience with different management and communication styles at the different places, where I have been living and working so far and with a special focus on how we Germans often  see ourselfes and how other people in the different countries, where I made professional and personal experience, often see us.  And I will also mention a very funny experience related to these cultural factors, which I made when I just had freshly arrived at Toluca, Mexico, for getting started on my new job challenge as Managing Director of ElringKlinger Mexico`s gasket and other car components factory there on june 1st, 2003. I had moved there directly from La Coruna, Spain, where I had been responsible for Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s "La Toja" cosmetics plant during 3.5 years until I decided, to terminate my employeeship after 16 extremely interesting and successful years with Henkel.  At that

Wow - so many of my followers, readers, fans, enemies etc. already lining up in front of my blog door hungry for beeing amongst the first readers of my today`s post. That`s enormously motivating me, to continue with this activity.  Please be clear about this. If You appreciate my posts and contents offered to You, nobody heppier and more proud than me in this whole so small, after and besides all, world.  Let me at first give You some feedback upon the incredible resonance to my blog. Although I have just started this new baby project (by the way "New Baby" was the name of the shortly after closed again baby (equipment!) store which my wonderful wife Selma and I took over at the beginning of 2010 in Recife in the northeast of Brazil, freshly arrived back (home?) again in Brazil from Mexico), the audience, the reception and the support by wonderful friends, business partners and other contacts from allover the world is really overwhelming me.  Thousand honest thanks for that t

Hi alltogether, here I am again, but I have just almost died from a heart attack. My lovely wife saved me in the last minute. How did this come?  Well, having woken up and taken a shower, I went down into our kitchen to prepare my (do You remember this from my post number 1? if no, please read it once more) beloved indian chai tea.  Standing in front of the kitchen window front, I let my eyes slide over our garden towards the house and garden of our neighbors and good friends Marcelo, Thais and their 4 years old lovely daughter Isadora, towards the horizon.  But everything was different than the last time, when I watched knowingly this scenary. Over our neighbors wall, where I normally could see beautiful trees and the mostly blue sky and birds, now there was a grey, ugly 4 meters high prison like wall, just missing the usual barbed wire and machine gun towers on top of such installations.  Oh shit - my initial thought was, that this could only signify, that Mr T..... or - even worse f

Good morning everybody. This wonderful sunday has just begun and I did not want to disappoint You and wanted to deliver my today`s post in time for Your morning coffee hour to You. It`s not still warm rolls from the bakery around Your corner, but I am sure, that You will enjoy it just as well.  You altogether are making me more than happy with all Your subscriptions, likes and wonderful comments to my posts in blogger, linkedin and Instagram and this is high energy fuel for my inner machine, which drives this blog. Many people ask me, whether I don`t sleep.  No – that`s not the point. I just have gotten accostumed to sleeping relatively little since years ago. But I`m not suffering any negative symptoms because of missing sleep. Anyhow I`m not sleepy during day and I have more the sensation, that my high energy and activity levels are just a different own “normal” than other people`s ones. And I immediately can recall the narrative saying, that the “Old Fritz”, King Frederick the Great

Hi everybody. Are You alive and fresh again, so that Your eyes can safely make their journey through my 3rd post ? I mean, right now it is saturday morning here in São Paulo and last night was friday night, so it might be a little too early still for at least some of You ..... Don`t worry, You`re excused. I know You.  Leave my post besides and read it in 5 hours.  Let me please at first give You some important general comments about my blog. When I started this blog exactly 3 days ago, I did not really read or understand a lot about the technical features of the blogger tool and the google functionality.  I just identified it quickly as one of the leading tools for people running blogs and after having played 5 minutes with it, I decided, that it`s very easy to use it and that therefore I`d like it. Anyhow I did not want to become much more than a pure user of this tool.  All the details, how it`s built and works etc. were truly spoken not at all of my interest. But after having done m