A really rich mixture for Your start today: Breakfast, Bosch and Marketing

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 of Prussia, also a highly active and somehow successful man, was famous and notorious for his very short sleeping time. Maybe my particular sleeping habits have to do with my second pre-name Friedrich (= Frederick). Who knows? I love such stories. 

Not only cold numbers and facts. Everybody needs also a little – hopefully well controlled – irrationality in his live. Otherwise what would be different then between us humans and robots? This is also very important in my own perception of the management of business and treatment of employees and any other business partners. 

Although I admire my name Frederick (which also was the name of the famous german emperor “Frederick the Red Beard”), I have not the least admiration or fascination for military style business resp. company organisations, which – believe it or not – still exist. 

Top down command, one person decides everything and the rest of the organisation just executes the orders. Only employees with dried out brains can stand this. That`s the robots, I mentioned above. 

What really fascinates and stimulates me, are organisations, where intelligent, educated, qualified, fully empowered employees on all the different organisation levels contribute highly motivated and with self-esteem to the development of the company`s strategies and goals. None of them a clone of any other team member. All and each of them different, mature, ethically oriented personalities of different sex and sexual preferences, colors, religions, cultures, habits and hobbies, but each of them always respecting the rights and the freedom of all others. 

That`s exactly what enriches companies and creates the most powerful teams. That`s at least the experience I made during long years in different companies at different places with different people and teams. And that`s exactly our style and culture at Vulkan in general and in our company in Itatiba in particular. 

This colorful picture leads me directly to the presentation to You of one of my most adored painters. Since my early childhood paintings have been fascinating me. I have no affection at all towards sculptures. They are all cold and dead for me. But I see paintings as living objects and I like very much colorful paintings like f.e frequently used in modern painting styles. Hieronymus Bosch (“Bosch”, “El Bosco”) is a very impressive and important painter for me. At the same time he is ultra modern and all but modern. 

As a early dutch painter, Bosch lived between 1450-1516 in the Netherlands and his dreamlike paintings reflect all types of sexual and sadistic fantasies, amongst others. His most famous paintings are “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and “The Cure of Folly” (both exhibited in the Prado museum in Madrid, Spain). Since more than 500 years the speculation about Bosch`s painting style and the meanings of this are ongoing and have not concluded. 

The painting I personally like most (see picture) is “The Ship of Fools”, an allegorical painting dated 1490-1500, which most propably has been influenced by the satirical allegory book with the same name (author: Sebastian Brant) which has been published in 1494 in Basel, Switzerland, and quickly spread all over Europe. 

There were certan times during my career, when I hung this painting in original size (well, a cheap but nice replica of it) into my office and was convinced, that it symbolized my HQ in bloody Germany. Sometimes I remain in doubts, whether I should move it from my office room at home back to my office in our factory. 

So, here I can comfortably come back to my comment from the beginning of this post, that everybody in my eyes needs some “controlled irrationality” to be really human and not a machine. This has – by the way – great importance and reflection exactly on economy, business and industry. 

During my years with Schwarzkopf & Henkel (1999: Technical Director in the “flagship” hair colorants plant in Viersen-Dülken, Germany, where we manufactured day & night in highly automized, state-of-the-art highspeed filling and packing machinery B2C  premium products at annual market sales value of 1.5 Billion Euros; 2000-2003: Plant Manager/Managing Director at Henkel`s famous “La Toja” cosmetics plant in La Coruna, Galizia, Spain) I learned a lot about marketing and it`s importance. 

Every 2 weeks I participated a full day in the marketing meetings for our different product Business Units (oral, skin, hair, body care) together with my colleagues from all the spanish marketing and sales departments, once every 3 months I participated in our global divisional marketing meeting at Henkel`s HQ in Düsseldorf. 

During my time as Managing Director of BOS Automotive, for whom I constructed and ramped up a huge car interior parts assembly plant in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, 2006-2009, I started to understand Toyota`s - and even more Lexu`s - main problem. Their cars could technically be considered amongst the best of the world, but in great parts of the world people regarded their cars as “cold”, not able to generate emotions and thus not able to really conquer and convince the customers. 

Very interesting subjects and learnings for me, which since then have been helping me a lot, to understand and manage bettter our industrial processes and the development of new products. Engineers normally are not on the same page as salesman and their customers. 

The core business of any company in my eyes is, to be strong in sales, customer management and relationship. For sure You need excelent products and be competitive. 

But the fanciest products are for the birds, if nobody reckognizes them as fancy and buys them. Good round up for finishing this post? 

I hope Your interest in painting, history, Bosch and also in marketing, customer and market management strategies and theories has been created, unless You are already deeply familiar with all this stuff and want to offer me now some lessons for advanced learning. 

Enjoy the pretty sunday, relax and get prepared for monday`s new job battles soon starting. I`ll knock once again on Your social media doors tomorrow morning and hope, You don´t refuse to let me come into Your eyes, ears and brains with my post number 5 then. 

Before I really finish, one more quick last question to all of You as readers of my posts: Did anybody so far find any technical problem with my so far published posts? Double or triple words, texts etc.... ?