No visits to headquarters, No cry

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 Hi all You faithful readers of my post. During this week I have participated in several online conferences with colleagues at our Vulkan Group (https://www.vulkan.com/pt-br/holding) corporate headquarters in Herne, Germany. And this brought me to the idea, to share some reflections with You. 

Since almost 25 years I have - in different general management functions for different German industrial companies - been responsible for our business and operations at the different places in the different countries, where I have been living.

When I started this career far away from Germany almost 25 years ago, the main limitation for close contact with our German headquarters and other global sister companies had mainly been the difficult communication and the poor technical means for transmission of technical data and documents.

This changed a lot with the appearance of the internet, email and smart communication devices and today - as we altogether have just experienced widely during the outbreak of the current Covid-19 crisis - is no issue at all any longer. 

My Brazilian management team colleagues and many employees at our company use frequently todays`s online conference tools and we all have made the experience, that - totally contrary to how this was in the past - today`s major challenge is not the lack of information and communication but the abundance of these. 

Related to all this and due to the fantastic communication devices and technologies which everybody has on hand nowadays, the velocity of communication and decision processes has increased tremendously and we all are practically reachable non-stop through the whole week including the weekend and all public or private holidays day and night. 

But for me and my live & work balance this is really wonderful and I am not complaining at all about these new circumstances, about which so many people complain. As already exposed in an earlier post about my experiences with the "Times Square Effect" (https://klausfhepp.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-times-square-effect-definitely.html), I do not feel overwhelmed by the flood of quick information, which endlessly reaches me and I also keep secure control of my reachability and availability. 

Just as an example - when at home in our house one of the many telefones rings, almost all other familly members - with my lovely wife in the first line - almost go crazy to attend it. I don`t. Let the phone ring. I`m the boss, not the fone. As the french say beautifully "le roy, c`èst moi". 

With all this mentioned, I come back to what I started to share at the beginning of my post. Normally during the last more than 20 years - always working far away from Germany for German companies - I have been visiting our corporate headquarters (Henkel: Düsseldorf, ElringKlinger: Dettingen/Stuttgart region, BOS: Ostfildern/Stuttgart region, GEA Heat Exchangers: Bochum, Vulkan: Herne) at least 2-3 times every year for participation in business meetings and workshops. 

Now it looks like this year - due to the Covid-19 circumstances-  would become the first year since I left Germany long time ago, in which I will not travel to our headquarters and to Germany in general for a complete year long.

Even if this was really the case, it would definitely not "kill" me or have any measurable negative effect on my activities and performance because with the help of the above mentioned modern technical means we keep our communication between us and our headquarters as well as with all other worldwide Vulkan Group subsidiaries going on uninterruptedly. 

This might at first glance sound crazy, but my sensation is, that due to the terrible travel restrictions our communication over long distance without physical meetings has even become more intensive than before. It would be interesting for me, to hear about Your own experiences with this. Maybe this is a even more wide spread general experience. 

The above shown pictures remember me of my last visit to our beautiful headquarters in Herne during June last year. But in November 2019 I still had the opportunity to meet my boss Sven Oelert, CEO of the Vulkan Group, and all other general management colleagues from our worldwide companies upon ocasion of our General Management Meeting in Madrid, which had as its culmination point our participation in the wonderful 50th anniversay party of our sister company Vulkan Espanola (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/spain). 

And for sure - fitting nicely to the headline of this post - my today`s music video recommendation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT8XvzIfi4U

Looking forward to the soon starting wonderful weekend! Wish You a lot of relaxation and hope to meet again with You tomorrow here in my blog.



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