My today`s rich mixture of African, Brazilian, Peruvian & Spanish experience content 4U

 Good afternoon all You followers of my blog and readers of my posts. Since my last post about 3 weeks ago I have been very busy mainly with the set up of the internal structures and key processes for several of the new strategic projects, which we have foreseen within our company for active realisation during this year.

For our completely new company Vulkan Africa (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/africa) my colleagues in Germany, South Africa and we here in Brazil have altogether defined the organisation and the main communication and reporting lines. Under my responsability and leadership as MD, two management teams will from now on be the motors for the development of all our business activities in the in total 48 different countries in the whole sub-Saharan region of the African continent.

We have set up the management team for Vulkan Africa and we also have set up a seperate management team for the Southern African sub region, where under the responsability and leadership of my colleauge Michael Lowin, MD of Vulkan South Africa, who reports directly to me in this function, all our business activities in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Zimbabwe shall be developped and executed from now on.

Two weeks ago we had the first meetings of both management teams and yesterday we realised a workshop with all our South African employees. Several of them live and work in Johannesburg, the industrial metropolis, where the headoffice and the service & distribution center of Vulkan South Africa are located. All meetings and conferences were held online, for sure, as we unfortunately still can`t travel there. It was once again a great pleasure for me to meet with all these wonderful, highly skilled and motivated colleagues.

At Vulkan do Brasil we have already actively initiated several projects within our "Factory of the Future" strategy, which will help us to accomplish the digital transformation of our whole company and factory in Itatiba during the next two years. This will help us, to step up on a completely new level of operational and administrational excellence and bring us additional competitive advantages, which shall enable us to achieve the aggressive growth plans for our national, regional and global sales during the next years.

As You can easily see, we are very busy and having a lot of fun with several really exciting and challenging projects besides our ongoing normal "day-to-day" business in Brazil and allover Latin America.

At Vulkan do Brasil we maintain fully all our protection measures, which we have implemented since March last year, when the Covid-19 threat has started in Brazil, and so far this has wonderfully protected us, our employees and our business. But the whole situation with regards to Covid-19 seems to run more and more out of control, at least in several regions of our country. The numbers of daily new infections and deaths continue very high and just today I read, that in many cities in the interior of the federal state of Sao Paulo, where we are located, the national health system starts to collapse and that the hospital beds for intensive therapy treatment are 100% occupied. Vaccination - like in almost all countries around the globe - is only very slowly proceeding. So better let`s cross our fingers  and continue with all firmly implemented protection measures - @work and @home !

Over the year`s end - during my "digital detox" period (see my first post from this year) - I found the time to read a handfull of interesting books, which I would like to shortly mention here for You.

In his book "Voce sabe com quem está falando?" ("Do You know with whom You are talking?") Roberto Damatta, Professor for Anthropology at PUC-Rio, author of several important books and columnist for the daily newspaper "Estado de Sao Paulo", describes and explains a phenomenon, which is very typical for parts of the Brazilian society and which You can encounter quite frequently in everyday situations. In such - very often really trivial - situations people try to demonstrate to others that they were exempt from obedience to rules and laws just because of their "superiority". It is very interesting, that almost the same question asked to somebody in the USA or Europe "Who do You think You are?" serves for exactly the contrary purpose - to recall to somebody`s attention that the rules and laws are the same for all citizens, no matter their social functions, titles, positions etc. Nice to read, it delivers interesting background explanations and helps to understand the behaviour of certain types of Braziliens. 

In my last post I expressed my sorrows about the dramatically increasing gang violence in great parts of Mexico, which formerly were "white spots" and did thus not suffer much such crime. When reading the book "Mataram Marielle" (authors Chico Otavio and Vera Araújo) it came clear for me, that unfortunately in Rio de Janeiro, the "marvelous city", which I like and love really so much, the situation is at least as critical as in Mexico and some places in Central America. It is uncredible, how deep the cancer of organized crime and corruption on all levels of administration, institutions and society has spread into the body of this megacity over the last decades. Great parts of Rio de Janeiro seem to be widely under the control of - on one side - drug gangs and - on the other side - the so called "militia", where heavily armed and totally unscrupulous active, retired and former police men, fire brigade workers and soldiers take control of whole areas of the city and impose their own laws and rules on the population and extort it. And since a couple of years these criminal organisations even have developped "political branches" and intruded parts of the town administration. It is very difficult to imagine, if and how this shall be turned back once and how then normal, lawful and democratic live circumstances can be reestablished for the suffering and defenseless population. 

A real must for reading is the great visiting professor (London Business School), business thinker (he was one of the fathers of the term and concept of "core business"), consultant (Strategos) and researcher (Woodside Institute) Gary Hamel`s book "Humanocracy - Creating organizations as amazing as the people inside them". I had already read his earlier book "The future of management", but "Humanocracy" fascinated me with it`s very comprehensible description of how to overcome the bureaucracies and create human-centric organisations. I warmly recommend Gary`s book to all of You. 

Last not least I became very much interested in a book presented by the Peruvian writer, essayist, journalist, college professor and Nobel Prize (for literature) winner Mario Vargas Lhosa in one of his weekly columns in the Spanish newspaper "El Pais". The author of the Spanish book "Madrid" is Andrés Trapiello. He describes in his book of 536 pages his meanwhile 50 years of living in Madrid and he presents the whole city to us, it`s streets, buildings, squares, parcs, but he also tells us a lot about the historical, cultural and political background of all these. A real must for all those - like me - who know and love Madrid. I have spent lots of weekends in this wonderful city during the almost 4 years between 2000 and 2003, when I was MD of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s famous cosmetics plant "La Toja" in La Coruña in Galicia in the beautiful north of Spain. 

I hope I have not bored You too much with my todays sharing of some literature recommendations. Unfortunately only Gary Hamel`s "Humanocracy" is available in English, "Sabe com quem está falando?" and "Mataram Marielle" are only available in Portuguese and "Madrid" - as far as I know - so far only in Spanish. 

Right now I am reading Walter Isaacson`s biography of Einstein. But I have just read the first few pages. I`ll comment to You in a future post, how I liked this book and what importance Einstein and his uncredible work and live means for me.  

I have decided to close this post with the picture which I took by myself of a quite famous but unknown (is this contradictory?) paining - "The last supper", painted by Marcos Zapata during 1753, which is hanging in Cusco`s, Peru, Cathedral Basilica. This large painting depicts Jesus and the twelve apostles gathered around a table preparing to dine on a guinea pig, which actually is today still served under the Peruvian name "cuy" as a culinary speciality in the Andes Mountains and in the past the guinea pig was an important food source for the indigenous Andean peoples. In one of my future posts I will share some remembrance from my extended weekend trip to Cusco and the Machu Picchu Inca citadel, which today is one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.  

Enjoy the rest of this wonderful weekend - here in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, we have a brilliant blue sky, approx. 30 °C during the day and a light, pleasant breeze.......

I wish You a great start into the next week and hope to meet again with You here in my blog upon ocasion of my next post. Your comments to this post are highly welcome. Feel free to contact me wherever You prefer.