Dear business partners, colleagues, and friends,
no event has left me more energized this year than the Management & Controlling Congress - ManCon 2024 for short - in Bad Oeynhausen earlier this week.
Initiated by Prof. Dr. Christian Faupel of the University of Applied Sciences Ostwestfalen-Lippe, ManCon has become the leading financial management conference in the northern half of Germany.
Taking place just days after Theodor Weimer's speech on the state of German politics and the German economy, ManCon 2024 not only provided a welcome contrast to Mr Weimer's lament, but also, I think, a truer picture of where we stand.
By its very nature, ManCon 2024 was not about a brand new business world - but it nonetheless showcased some of the key strengths of business in this country: the pragmatic, non-flashy, non-dramatic but tireless competence that seeks to refine every skill, every product and every process until it is the best it can be.
As host of the Interaction Stage at the conference, I had the privilege of introducing a series of presentations - on new planning tools, ways to improve financial leadership, harness the power of AI, ways to extract value from ESG, and much more - not from the giants of consulting, but from Mittelstand firms, smaller indeed, but no less committed to excellence in their offerings.
Equally, many of the participants came from the hidden champions of which the region has such a strong network: often family-owned, but always no-nonsense, frugal, supremely competent and ever more enterprising in their determination to realise opportunities on a global scale.
Finally, meeting some of my former direct reports and seeing how, in a few short years, they have become recognised experts or business leaders in their own right... that was my personal highlight.
Fortified by the glimpse of the resilience and strength of German business ManCon provided, while I share Mr Weimer's criticism of our present government's harmful policies, I wholeheartedly reject his prophecy of economic decline - a prophecy which I am sure he will be as happy to see refuted as the rest of us.
Best regards,
Dietmar
LUCILIUS INTERIM
Dr Dietmar Scheja
Financial Leadership
The pumped-up 33 comes courtesy of Philip Oroni on unsplash.com - thank you so much.
