As you may have read in the news, the German automotive industry is under unprecedented pressure. It is the result of a mix of internal factors, changing geopolitics, new technologies, new competitors and last but not least a dysfunctional German government. Volkswagen Group, the company I have been associated with for decades, has been hit exceptionally hard. It is not the first crisis we see in the company, …
The Wolfsburg Art Museum exhibits multiple installations by Hans Op De Beek, still on until September 3rd, and very worth visiting (even for me, who is not very much following such art installations normally). I liked the multiple levels of space and time, wondering through while walking along. You may enter through an installation called "The Collector's House" and then continue into the main exhibition hall, descending a staircase. It is rather monochrome and dark down there, and time stands still in a way. I really had no sense, of how long I was walking through the alleys, and there is also no obvious way out. You have to find the hole in the fence.
"The Collector's House" by Hans Op De Beek
Long view on "The Collector's House" by Hans Op De Beek
The Arts Museum in Wolfsburg, has been always reaching far beyond town. I visited the photo exhibition of Pieter Hugo today, titled "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea". Pieter was born in South Africa in 1976 and I found his portraits, family photos and documentary style photography extremely fascinating. I am not sure, whether I am supposed to capture parts of the exhibition with my point and shoot camera from my pocket. But I think, this photographer should receive more attention, so forgive me for the hip shots.
I am staying a few days in Wolfsburg, where there is the headquarter of the Volkswagen Group. And I arrived by train to the car city - fast, comfortable and carbon neutral (which is an option for the ticket). Shaken by the Diesel Emission Scandal, Volkswagen Group and its brands are going through change. But you don't feel much of that in town. Yes, there are "reskilling" and "upskilling" programs for the staff and management. But it will take a while to distil the fuel out of people' blood and make it electrons. But still, given the resources put into making this change and the recent advances made, I am sure Volkswagen will live up to its commitments. Still, as the local newspaper "Wolfsburger Rundschau" reports today, the Diesel Emission Scandal is the largest in post-war German industrial history. At the early stage of it, I published a Business Case at ACRC (Asian Case Research Centre) on it, which is also distributed through Harvard Business School (click here, to download).
Arriving in the car city at the Wolfsburg train station
My journey is mainly one of joy and meeting friends. Sorry for those, which I did not see this time. It still is always quite busy for me in Wolfsburg. We will have more chances. But I did make a stroll through the Autostadt. Back when I worked in Wolfsburg, I witnessed this theme park and delivery center for cars coming into existence and did myself quite a few projects related to that. The changes I saw though, is that the brand pavilions are much more product oriented than before, and less communicating the brands. I personally regard this as a step back. It might be the result of a rather uninspired CEO, Martin Winterkorn, who ruled the club, while I was stationed in China from 2003 to 2014. I have not visited the Autostadt since then.
View on the old power plant of the Volkswagen Wolfsburg site, at the Mittellandkanal.
I always enjoy strolling through the "Zeithaus", which is a historical car museum, not just dedicated tho Volkswagen, but to the whole history of cars. It has a marvelous collection of iconic cars, and I photographed a lot of the exhibits. If you like you can download all these photography from my fileserver by clicking here. If you are interested in the typology of cars, these photos will be a good reference, and if you like to repost them, please feel free to to so (of course I am happy if you give me credit by linking to this blog post for example).
Inside the Autostadt, with view on the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the Skoda Brand Pavilion (on the right)
This is an interesting novelty in the Autostadt. It is a rotating tunnel of flowers and called "Dufttunnel" (Tunnel of smell).
Walking through the rotating "Dufttunnel". It is really a very nice experience of flower smells around you. Be careful some drops of irrigation water might fall on you. But this is a nice "tunnel view", isn't it? If you are interested in watching how the mechanics of this tunnel works on a video, you can download the video file here.
A daytime view on Sarah Hadid's building in Wolfsburg, hosting the Phaeno science museum.
After more than a week working in Wolfsburg and a wonderful weekend trip to Potsdam and Berlin, I am on the way back to Beijing. Germany is a place where life is easy. Things work efficiently, the environment is clean and people are friendly. For a moment I hesitated at that thought: Germans friendly? They did neither have this reputation nor I have them in my memories like that. But they are. Even in the North, where they are said to be "cold" and serious, I found them quite humorous. So either they have improved or I changed my benchmark. These days I am already happy, when people don't spit at me and fart strait into my face or shout into a mobile phone. But I take it with ease. Actually, I always take it with ease. That's because of my stoic personality, which is sometimes mistaken as inter-cultural tolerance.
The normal hassle on the transfer from Terminal A to Terminal B in Frankfurt was brightened up by a Lufthansa ground staff whom I asked whether there is a post office box on the way?
"Give it to me", she replied.
I gave her some postcards and she said: "I will post them tonight on the way home".
She seemed happy that someone is still writing postcards and then blushed a bit and said: "I promise, I won't read them"
How sweet. I guess, in other places they would not get to the mailbox but be strait away posted on Weibo (the Chinese alternative to Facebook - actually it is not a real alternative, because Facebook is blocked in China). I passed by long corridors of "Beauty Free Shops" (my not really funny but true alliteration of Duty Free Shops) and finally made it to my terminal. There is nothing more triste than these large airports. It feels like downtown Hong Kong: mall, toilet, food, mall, toilet, food, mall toilet, food etc. All branded, sterilized and standardized.
The advantage of a Business Class flight is more legroom. And the Air China planes are specially nice. The seat nearly unfolds into a bed. But the disadvantage is to be surrounded by a certain kind of business people, which are not just dead boring but also actively expose that by starting a conversation. With the reform of the German education system and dropping it to down to international standard many German managers now also have serious intellectual shortcomings. It is really hard to have an interesting conversation with them. The other dominant group in the cabin are Chinese new rich who are watching cartoons, chewing on their nuts with open mouth and smiling through rotten teeth like the dogs they are. I am not looking forward to see (and hear) them having dinner!
I will have a busy second half of the week in Beijing and then teach a course in the Tongji-Mannheim University EMBA Programme. It was nice to see my colleagues in Wolfsburg, some of them again, some the first time. It was not enough time to see them all, and I missed out on a few old friends also. I am sorry. I will come again.
Ulrich Wickert, one of the most popular news anchors in German television, once when he was asked what he likes most, answered: "French wine, French cheese and French women's legs". And then, when he was asked what he dislikes most, he said: "German wine, German cheese and German women's legs".
I was somehow reminded of this quote sitting over breakfast in the dining hall of my hotel in Wolfsburg, being surrounded by a group of mid aged (actually about my age) German woman who must have come here for shopping in the so-called "Designer Outlets". But they seem to be traveling also internationally, as they were talking about their "Australia tour" and many others showing off to me where they have been.
I see these woman traveling the world as an integrated part of the German National Defense strategy. Nobody would ever dare to invade or attack a country where such women come from. They are the modern form of maintaining the Cold War "Balance of Threat Strategy", not with nuclear weapons but with an enormous potential of retaliation. As Germany is a core NATO member, I would be really careful as Syrian Air Defense shooting down Turkish planes in the future. You want us to send you a tour bus strait into Damascus? - Wom!
With many hardware and systems manufacturers diversifying into the service industry, I could think that these women could make a substantial part of the business of companies like Krauss Maffei and Rheinmetall in the future. And it makes it easier also, because unlike a battle tank, combat helicopter or submarine a tour bus would not need parliamentary export clearance. Well, not yet!
Do you know the feeling, when you visit a place you were very familiar with a long time ago? While your mind is redrawing the map and match it with your memories, you get surprised how much you actually forgot. Sometimes you say encouraging: "Oh, so many things changed here". But not much really changed. It is just that you forgot a lot and always told yourself (and others) the same stories.
You meet people which have stayed over all these years. Children have turned into adults. Young people have turned into middle aged ones. The former middle aged ones are now close to retirement. Some got old, some died. The pretty daughter of the baker is not pretty any more. The soccer player from the kicking ground is now the soccer coach at the kicking ground.
The first time I came to Wolfsburg was 14 years ago for an interview. When I asked in the office in Munich how to get there, I was told:"No clue. Fly to Warsaw and then take a taxi". When I then moved there, I arrived with all my belongings packed into a Daihatsu. This must have been the strangest car ever entering the territory of the Volkswagen City (it was actually the strangest car in the parking lot of the Munich BCG office also). I left the region again in 2003 for China and now returned after more than 8 years for a business trip.
It reminds me of the feeling going back to your old school and meeting the old teachers. The formerly young ones are now in the middle of accomplishing their career. And the professional authorities of the past are now spending their last few years before retirement. In a corporate environment, where leadership changes sometimes abruptly make losers out of winners and winners out of losers, these "dislocations" can be sometimes quite severe. Still the more professional merits people have, you can see that they are less dependent than the ones which have been purely counting on personal connections and "mentors". And also those who have to many Volkswagen branded bones in their skeleton, tend to suffer personally more when these bones are pulled out one day - specially when one of them was the spine.
