17th international
Starnberg Management Days
A brief review
November 28th and 29th, 2024
The coming waves
walking the balancing act of successful corporate development amid geopolitical conflicts and new technologies
-
How do you lead, invest and transform in these challenging times?
-
How do you bring new technologies into everyday business life - from buzzword to action?
-
The sales ecosystem as a booster in B2B?
-
In which steps is robotics continuing to march forwards?
-
Changing careers: How do you develop in companies and in the high-tech community?
-
How unpopular can a CFO be in times like these?
The most important statements of the event at a glance...
Werner Seidenschwarz
At the moment, we have a downturn in Germany, not just a crisis. Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are the two central general-purpose technologies for the future. XIAOMI is now building the "car to the smartphone". AUDI is developing its new electric vehicles from China. In San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, fully autonomous driving with Waymo’s robot cabs has become part of everyday life. Real diversity begins where you no longer talk about it or need to talk about it. New organizational concepts give room for revolutions. Excellent players get more freedom. Companies are getting faster.
Reinhold Gross
"KUKA is a global company with German roots and a German headquarters and a Chinese owner."
According to current studies, robotics will be the fastest-growing industry after artificial intelligence by 2040.
Jens Neumann
Sales employees usually know their way to the customer. But they drive with the navigation system so that they can also avoid a traffic jam. With this in mind, we should also use our technologies in sales. "The customer only opens his door if the salesperson understands his business model and really helps the customer with it.“
Ana Ivanović
The former No. 1 in the tennis world rankings impressively showed how she is committed to her overarching goal of "Love and Peace" and that it is always worthwhile to pursue your dreams even under the most difficult conditions.
Jutta Keeß
If a manager wants to learn an instrument, it should be the tuba. They are usually available for free in schools ;-)
Jenny Seidenschwarz
"The exchange via conferences between researchers from universities and companies such as NVIDIA, Google or Meta is so open that their lead "over the rest of the world" is even further expanded.“
Andreas Buske
Zwiesel Kristallglas has reduced its production from the original three furnaces to one furnace.
With the founding of the Zwiesel Fortessa Group, the company has developed into a "House of Brands" with in-house production expertise for the "laid table" with products from all over the world – no longer just goblet glasses from Germany.
Lars Grünert
"Constancy is an asset in a family business." Trumpf is a German family-owned company with a strong commitment to Germany as a business location and the family's always positive approach to new technologies. The cooperation with ASML in a future industry with a turnover of € 1 billion is an example of success.
Bettina Richter
"It's getting more colorful. And if there are no clear values, goals and authentic implementations driven by the management, for example to develop more female managers, this will not succeed.“
Holger Michalka
"It's Black Friday today. And we make sure that the lights don't go out today." "I have never experienced such momentum as we currently have in the energy industry – even with all the risks that have to be overcome."
Werner Seidenschwarz opened the 17th International Starnberg Management Days with the following statement:
“We currently have a downturn in Germany, not just a crisis. Everything is now so inadequate that something should develop from this mixture that can become really big.”
Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are the two central general-purpose technologies – surrounded by a bundle of technologies such as quantum computing, robotics, nanotechnology and the potential for abundant energy.
These technologies are no longer just a set of independent practices, but an interconnected series of parts. As a result, these technologies infect each other and drive each other forward. The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman is “the” book of the year in this respect.
Then there is China: the typical price and cost advantage of Chinese companies in B2B business is around 40 - 50%. And XIAOMI is now building the car for the smartphone. “Nothing hangs. Everything connects. You don't feel like you're getting a system on the screen when you pick up a new car that could have come from a second-hand cell phone store when you see the system starting for the first time.” The car is "delivered to the smartphone".
China Part 2: AUDI is developing its new electric vehicles with SAIC from China on the basis of the Chinese vehicle architecture of the SAIC premium brand IM Motors.
On synthetic biology: Bayer and its subsidiary BlueRock Therapeutics are working on an accelerated approval process for a cell therapy that can treat Parkinson's in the long term and perhaps even cure it.
And about autonomous driving: In San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, fully autonomous driving with the Waymo robotaxi service is already part of everyday life in a complicated and human-relevant environment – almost unnoticed by the European environment. This is tangible and felt high-tech.
Tangible high-tech also happens in the leading sales community. With a focus on digital transformation sales, companies build a competitive advantage in fields such as automated pricing, target customer qualification, usage of next-best activities for the optimal product mix with artificial intelligence, in the follow-up of visits and route planning, in the establishment and further development of a market-active inside sales and much more.
And this works if you have a sales strategy from idea to value® that is characterized by the characteristics of simplicity and comprehensibility – developed by the market leader for sales strategies in B2B in German-speaking countries.
With a focus on the transformation for the success of tomorrow®, we are focusing on the growth industries of large-scale digital players, IT, co-location, energy, pharmaceuticals and others – without neglecting the strong positions in the established core markets.
Omni-channel interweaves multi-channel through the seamless integration of all customer touchpoints. Sales becomes the most exciting task in the company.
Finally, Werner Seidenschwarz highlighted a few splinters on leadership processes: Modern technologies create space for topics that are neglected in many places – strategy work, employee development and more time for customers.
Proven concepts such as target costing for low-price product developments are being revived. This is changing companies. There is definitely a "healthy fear" in the companies that have neglected these lower market segments. This creates space for ideas.
New organizational concepts are emerging. Take Dynamic Shared Ownership, for example. This has room for revolutions: "You can fool your boss, but you cannot fool your peers." Fewer hierarchical levels, faster work in simpler structures.
… and give the excellent players freedom – as with Clint Eastwood with Morgan Freeman. They use it and act in the interest of the whole. They possess the qualities of courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication.
And more excellent players are needed for the international catch-up race in the deep-tech industries, in the growth markets, in the high-end, mid-range and low-price sectors as well as in the simplification and digitization of processes.
"I believe in market-driven strategies, constant striving for improvement, and the transformative power of technology for sustainable growth. I attach great importance to fostering cohesive and competent teams to lead our company to innovation and success." That is Reinhold Gross' self-image.
As CEO of KUKA Robotics, he spoke on the milestone topic of robotics. "KUKA is a global company with German roots and a German headquarters and a Chinese owner." So KUKA can play both the European card and the Chinese card. All-in-One.
According to current studies, robotics in general will be the fastest growing industry by 2040, with the expected second-largest CAGR after artificial intelligence. By then, today's more 6-axis robots will also have approached the human hand with its "24 axes".
KUKA was a pioneer in robotics "from birth": 60 robots were produced in 1977, today 40,000 robots per year in two assembly plants – one in Germany, one in China. MIDEA as the Chinese owner is a B2C company with a "focus on the household and air conditioning sector with 200,000 employees who make €50 billion in sales."
The importance of China can be seen from the fact that 52% of the robots produced worldwide are purchased in China. In terms of robot density, China overtook Germany for the first time this year and displaced it from 3rd place.
When it comes to bottlenecks, KUKA does not have a shortage of software developers. Applications will evolve more and more from programmable processes with high repetition frequency to non-programmable situations – e.g. for bin picking when gripping parts in logistics.
The current direction is also moving more and more towards mobile robotics. The technologies "Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence" will play a central role in this.
The fields of application of robotics are opening up more and more every day – from applications such as window cleaning of high-rise buildings to care robots to the nightly loading of shop shelves with high complexity.
Jens Neumann, Managing Director Sales Steering at the flagship sales unit in the Würth Group, talked about how he and his interdisciplinary teams are bringing digital transformation into everyday application. As a trained computer scientist and businessman, no one can typically fool him in what works – or what doesn't work!
"A little rethinking multi-channel is not enough." And it takes teamwork between business and IT. "You must talk the IT-language and understand the basics of the business model at the same time." We remain true to the company's tradition: "We have fundamentally developed our business model 5 times over the years. Now it is the change "from caterpillar to butterfly": from sales originally focused on field sales to multichannel sales to today's omnichannel sales.
Omnichannel needs systems, data and technology. In the case of AWKG, this involves 5,000 employees in sales (out of a total of 8,000 employees), who must be controlled systemically. In the process, 460 exabytes of data will be generated in Würth as early as 2025. By comparison, all the words ever spoken by mankind fit into 5 exabytes.
For years, the transformation of sales has been moving from "salesperson as a caretaker for 250 customers" to high-quality sales, which does not simply "take more orders" with fewer customer contacts, but is starting to sell more and more systems and solutions.
The customer wins. "But he also only opens the door if the salesperson understands his business model and really helps."
Acceptance of modern technologies in sales increases the most when the benefits of the system become visible. Fields of application with added value can best be conveyed if they are presented simply: for example, in route planning, churn analyses or in the initial purchase situation on the basis of an automatically proposed price.
The PICO voice bot established at Würth already conducts 60,000 conversations with sales, mainly from the car on the way to the customer. The journey has begun. Now it's time to accelerate.
Three impressive women earned a wave of sympathy from the participants of the 17th International Starnberg Management Days.
Of course, everyone was excited about the superstar Ana Ivanović, the former number 1 in the tennis world rankings and winner of the French Open. But with the three women getting to know each other, it became a power pack that obviously got along very well from the first moment and made the evening round entertaining, inspiring and multifaceted.
The youngest in the group, Jenny Seidenschwarz, a researcher for artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision, started. With fresh impressions from Silicon Valley and San Francisco, she talked about living and working in the international community of Big Tech companies and the No. 1 Institute for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA.
She researches and develops the technologies in the engine room of AI: Multi-object Tracking, Semi-supervised 3D LiDAR Object Detection and Point Tracking via 3D Reconstruction.
"Competitiveness" is already a key word in everyday life on site. Five weeks later, when it's your turn to publish a paper, "... it can be assumed that someone else will bring the topic into the community. And then you start all over again for the next nine months."
Although out of 12,000 applicants for conferences in Seattle, Vancouver or Singapore, for example. only 2,000 are selected for presentation, the exchange between researchers from universities and companies such as NVIDIA, Google or Meta is so open there that their lead "over the rest of the world" is even further expanded.
"That's why the well-known surfing on Californian beaches rarely succeeds in this high-tech community ..." But working and living in such an international landscape makes up for everything.
At Jenny Seidenschwarz's home institute at the Technical University of Munich alone, the young researchers come from countries as diverse as Turkey, Kosovo, China, Russia, Spain, Germany and Italy.
That was music to the ears of Jutta Keeß, probably the most famous tuba player in the German-speaking world at the moment. She also lives in a wide range of different origins. She is not only a member of one of the most popular techno bands in the German-speaking world "Dicht&Greifend". She also performs with the Munich Symphony Orchestra and the Jazzrausch Big Band as well as with her band Lila.
She captivated the audience after the evening talk with her band Lila and was only allowed to leave the stage after several encores. The group of top managers fully engaged with her.
When asked which extraordinary personality she particularly appreciated, she named: Ana Ivanović.
The perplexity and enthusiasm of the evening’s moderator was clear to see, but it offered him the perfect transition to respond to the person Ana Ivanović in an easygoing and informal way.
And of course, she described the phenomenal year 2008, when she climbed the tennis heights, won Roland Garros and became the number 1 in world tennis.
… and how to recognize chances of being able to get back into the game by "reading" facial expressions, gestures and body language of an opponent on the court.
After that, questions about tennis became a minor matter.
Werner Seidenschwarz was able to ask his questions in his typical manner and in the well-known open but trusting atmosphere of the event, which usually go far beyond what is already publicly known about his interview partners.
Ana Ivanović got involved and emotionally described her youth in the war zone of the former Yugoslavia, her struggle and her first lonely trips to tournaments across sanctioned and closed areas. In the first few years, she was often on her own - albeit always with the unconditional support of her parents.
In her reserved and sympathetic way, she described her path to number 1 up to her current life as a mother, entrepreneur and UNICEF ambassador in Serbia for children's rights and education with the always overarching goal of "Love and Peace".
"You have to reinvent yourself again and again." That's a simple sentence.
But how much energy do you need if you have to bring it to life several times in a few years?
Andreas Buske, owner of Zwiesel Kristallglas AG, took the audience on his journey. The participants were impressed by the daring, intellectual acuity and implementation skills of the managing partner and his management team.
"In tense times, you need a team behind you that you can rely on blindly in order to be able to face external influences."
During Corona, the manufacturer, which at that time was still fully focused on goblet glasses, was confronted with a 70% drop in sales. Even the approximately 80% market share in the professional premium market of hotels, restaurants and catering did not help the company anymore.
With the start of the Ukraine war, energy costs in this energy-intensive business have peaked from €14 to €300 per megawatt hour this year.
Even today, the energy price is 300%, well above the original level before the outbreak of the Ukraine war. "The basic materials industry in Germany is dead." Many glassworks in Germany have ceased operations – today there are only two left.
Zwiesel Glas has reduced its production from the original three furnaces to one furnace. And that meant: "Cherished old paths had to be abandoned. It's no longer just the self-made glass that is the real deal." The company has learned to reinvent itself.
People have embraced digitization – also because/although it is easier to market the high-quality champagne bowls on the Internet under "champagne glasses" than under "champagne bowls".
With the founding of the Zwiesel Fortessa Group, the company has developed into a House of Brands with in-house manufacturing expertise and today offers the "set table" with products from all over the world – and no longer just goblet glasses from Germany.
In the case of Chinese products, Seidenschwarz & Comp. sees cost and price advantages of around 40 – 50% for Chinese competitors in its projects. In addition, there is another, not entirely insignificant point: Even if European companies in China make use of their investment surcharge of 10 – 20%, they often still do not manage to offer cheaper prices.
Many European companies are struggling with the fact that they have remained in the premium segment for too long. And if you lack the courage to reposition your company in the low-price segments with Target Costing – not with design-to-cost tinkering – you will of course have to fear the Chinese competitors.
Over the past 35 years, the Seidenschwarz brand has been able to make many contributions to successful developments for low-price products. However, the courage of companies to tackle such radical changes internally is particularly noteworthy.
Lars Grünert also stands for a courageous approach. The CFO of Trumpf is someone who has dealt with this topic in depth in recent years and has a special view on it.
In his contribution, he therefore addressed, among other things, how to operate with your own low-price brand from China on the basis of a two-brand strategy.
He also clarified how to deal with the effects of these competitive distortions from the point of view of a CFO, especially in tense times. As CFO, you are then right in the middle of it all and, as the guardian of profitability in the company, you are equipped with a very special role that he lives in Trumpf every day.
“Constancy is an asset in a family business." The close exchange between a CFO and the family and shareholders ensures the balance between profitability and new paths to be taken.
The fact that a German family-owned company like Trumpf, with its strong commitment to Germany as a business location and the family's always positive approach to new technologies, sometimes sees future issues from a different perspective than a CFO ensures a constructive forward-looking attitude.
The cooperation with ASML in a future industry with a turnover of € 1 billion is an extraordinary example of success.
With Bettina Richter as Global Operations and Strategy Director, Medical Sciences at Solventum, a doctor of chemistry contributed her view of "Career in Transition". Solventum is a spin-off of 3M Health Care. And who doesn't look forward to a contribution from the 3M environment, a company that has fascinated so many people over the decades.
Bettina Richter is an example of how a doctor of chemistry with two children and a husband can make a career in an international corporation. She also encourages young women to dare to take such a path.
"It's getting more colorful. And if there are no clear values, goals and authentic implementations on the part of management, for example wanting to develop more female leaders, this will not succeed."
A culture for diversification must be created. "It has to be made tangible and you have to be convinced in the sense of a 'we believe that' and 'we want that'."
You also need the men for that. 3M has therefore very successfully started an attempt to have the topic of "how can we develop more women into management positions?" also discussed and elaborated by teams consisting of men. And then it was realized: "The main problem for change is not Generation Z, but also "the proportion of 50-year-olds who don't want to change."
When addressing these issues, "American companies are 10 – 20 years ahead of us when it comes to diversity."
Bettina Richter described numerous entrenched patterns of behavior and thus ensured a lively discussion in the plenary.
The same applies to entrepreneurship in the USA. And Bettina Richter has always seen herself first and foremost as an "internal entrepreneur" in her role. But she also sees this as a central element of her work as a manager.
Werner Seidenschwarz summed up: Wouldn't it be nice if sooner rather than later we all succeeded in seeing these changing careers soon established in companies and in the private sphere?
"Because real diversity starts where you don't have to talk about it anymore. Because it's there."
"We are a family business, now active with the owner family after more than 155 years in the 6th generation and are currently discussing grandchild capability. That gives the family its principles."
As an independent family-owned company, founded in 1868 with a focus on the control of power transformers, 4,000 employees work there today at more than 50 locations with a turnover of around €1.3 billion.
It can be assumed that this sales value will soon be a thing of the past and that the company will gradually develop into new worlds in a thoroughly conservative industry.
On the topic of potential for energy in abundance addressed by Werner Seidenschwarz, the message can be summarized briefly and succinctly: the world needs electricity.
The answer was given by Holger Michalka, Managing Director of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen: "I have never experienced such momentum as we currently have in the energy industry – even with all the risks that have to be overcome." "For example, Frankfurt is full of server farms – more is not possible."
"Order intake in MR is therefore 100% higher than in the previous year. The delivery time for power transformers is currently 12 – 14 months. "This also opens the door for Chinese suppliers. Because only the Chinese can currently still supply transformers. They have doubled their capacities during Corona."
"That's why the following applies to us: We have always added 20% slices to the existing infrastructure for the last 4 years. We are at the limit. I now build plants worldwide. I have to ramp up capacities. I have to hire people. New cultures are now growing together. How can I combine the international with Regensburg, with the Upper Palatinate region – as a South Hessian?"
For MR, five pillars of direction provide the orientation forward: deglobalization, decarbonization, demography, destabilization and digitalization. The company is addressing them with its innovative approach: "If you have a solution to a problem that no one knows about yet, then that's our game changer. Always for the best technology – up-to-date from product to system to digitalization. That's how we keep the distance to the competition."
So that the participants could take home three good ideas from the event again this year, which they can also implement directly!
”There are dates in the calendar that you look forward to long in advance. And the date for the International Starnberg Management Days is definitely one of them. I'm really looking forward to being here. Because somehow it's always like being among friends.” Holger Michalka, Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen
The 18th international Starnberg Management Days will take place on June 4th and 5th 2025.
We will be welcoming Thomas Schmall, Member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG for the Technology Division, Dr. Jens Hardenacke, CEO of Kardex Holding and Andreas Penkert, Managing Director Sales of Gamma Reifen AG, among others.