The entrepreneurial challenges of the future can only be translated into profit through creative leadership combined with well-founded skills. This was a maxim shared vividly by Prof. Dr. Werner G. Faix, program director of the Stuttgart Competence Day and director of the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship (SIBE) at Steinbeis University Berlin (SHB). His speech was heard by more than 600 visitors in Stuttgart’s House of Commerce on December 2, 2011.
To provide young people with the skills they need and prepare them for their responsibilities as future managers, there are partners like Steinbeis. This was a point emphasized several times by Claus Schmiedel, political group leader of the SPD in the Baden-Württemberg regional parliament and deputy chairman of the Steinbeis Foundation Board of Trustees. He underscored the regional parliament’s wish to strengthen collaboration with Steinbeis and establish the Transfer Network as a center of innovation, internationalization and skilled worker training in Baden-Württemberg.
Speaking on behalf of IBM Germany, Roland Scheffler said that creativity is one of these management skills. The 2011 IBM Global CEO Study indicated that businesses will have to deal with more and more complexity in the future, stating that companies that cherish CEO creativity as the most important leadership quality will be the ones to establish themselves. This concept was also central to the talk given by Prof. John Erpenbeck (School of International Business and Entrepreneurship at SHB). He described leadership competence as the ability to react creatively to new management situations. Jens Mergenthaler (School of International Business and Entrepreneurship at SHB) approached leadership from a different angle, looking at the term from a linguistic standpoint. Prof. Dr. Rudolf Tippelt (LMU, Munich) demonstrated the close connections between management training and personality development, proposing six theses that explain the successful interplay between education, personality and professionalism. Dr. Ulrich Schreiterer of The Social Science Research Center (WZB) in Berlin emphasized this point, looking over the “Big Pond” to different approaches toward leadership education in the United States.
Udo Sturm (ABB) and Carsten Schlichting (Bosch) provided an insight into business within corporations, examining the issues of management development and succession planning. Dr. Joachim Sailer (Steinbeis Transfer Institute of Growth Management at SIBE, SHB) gave a vivid insight into the growing importance of further education for older managers in the future. Dr. Barbara Niedner (behavioral biology and leadership) showed how politics can provide a role model for management development, looking at the issue from the angle of behavioral biology and pointing out what managers can learn from “politics in the sand box.” As the convention drew to a close, the Master of Science in International Management at the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship celebrated its nomination as a “Selected Location 2011” in the “365 Landmarks in the Land of Ideas” competition, which is sponsored by the “Germany – Land of Ideas” initiative in collaboration with Deutsche Bank.
Impressions
Recordings of speeches