Originally I wanted to study nuclear physics at my college, TGM Vienna – but the class was already full and so they put me into the digital technology class (a combination of semiconductor physics and informatics. It didn’t make a big difference, as none of the qualifications offered job openings in Austria and so I started to work in the UK, France and the US after graduation, where I took MBA courses at Bryant College, RI.

We learned to focus on products, slim out vertical integration and maximizing market share by crowding out competition to be best practice money maker model. Back in Austria, which at that time still limped behind the Western European Coal-Union countries’ prosperity from paying off independence annuities for its neutrality, was a kind of Hybrid but also bridge between Comecon and European Economic Co-operation. And of course geologically the remainders of the pre-world war Austrian Empire still benefited from its full variety of minable resources as well as its historical circular R&D on adding value to them. This led to making the country’s engineering sector to an incredible competence center in materials science.

So what, if you can’t get a job in your profession but want to raise your own family where you came from, one has to become an entrepreneur! Of course the field of materials applied in my original industry was most appealing to me which led into my development of Electrovac AG (until 2007). Of course I had tried the money maker model learned in America – until the exchange rate had halved in 1987, which for my business with all the semiconductor assemblies having had moved out to Asia forced me to revise strategy. Actually it had been my customers Matsushita, Bosch and Siemens at the time who consigned tasks to us considering our team the best available top people to do the job – and we didn’t disappoint them! Although when I asked my staff, what we could learn from that, it still had to be me telling them that building business on applying accrued knowledge in new applications was where to look for our future.

Shortly after I innocently shared this experience with several impressing manager personalities in a Peter Drucker seminar – who fortified the importance of this cognition and recognized me 7 years later out of a delegates’ crowd at a Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute’s [ #GDI ] event with him. 20 years later the Sloan Management School of Harvard, Boston started publishing papers about what I had switched to 30 years ago calling it Qualitative Growth Strategy. Namely, to follow a Model of:

Focus on capabilities, allocate markets in need for it and choose a field of application to concentrate on, plus develop flexibility needed to not only adapt to, but to anticipate or even trigger market changes. This model performed at more than 2-times the IRR in average over the 15 years I ran it, than the best year of Quantitative Growth Strategy did before. Basically how most Hidden Champions innovate instinctively!

#PeterDrucker, #SloanSchool, #GDI, #HumanCapital