Klaus Reichert: Rolf Kunisch, Mr. Kunisch
Whoever is acquainted with Mr. Kunish,
knows that he doesn't like to be in the spotlight.
But what happened,
was that whether he was self motivated
or persuaded by others,
it is a very interesting phenomenon
and it transpired by itself.
The fascinating thing that I've heard about him,
is that for him, his work, his company,
and his products were the very focal point.
Mr. Kunisch has made some very significant moves in his life
and my impression is
that he is a person who had a very large team of people
behind, next to, and under him
to whom he gave clear leadership.
In doing so, he has this energy that he puts into his team, the individuals,
so that they don't go off in all directions, but are channeled
towards one goal, towards one outcome.
I believe that he, as leader of the team, has shown them the way.
That he contributed to the welfare of the group, the company,
the product, the stakeholders
-- not to cozy up to them --
but for other reasons.
I am very pleased to now introduce Mr. Kunisch,
and offer him the stage.
Rolf Kunish: Good morning.
I want to speak with you about choices.
Not about power or drive, but about choices.
Choices that perhaps can drive you.
The first choice I'm going to talk about is the decision to speak here.
This wasn't actually my choice,
but rather Mr. Reichert's choice
as he talked me into it.
(Laughter)
I didn't really want to give any more speeches,
at least not in public,
because in April of this year
when I turned 70, I said:
After 70, you shouldn't have to speak in public anymore.
You shouldn't have to dress up.
You should only have to look after your family and your grandchildren.
I held onto this position until today.
I'll give it a go once again.
I am, if you will -- it always sounds a bit funny --
what you would call "a PIP."
You know what a VIP is:
Very Important Person,
and I am the next generation
and that is Previously Important Person.
(Laughter)
You can recognize us because every phrase,
every sentence begins with the words:
"Don't you know how important I was?"
And no one is interested in that.
But you have to learn this.
And being willing to learn this is a an individual choice.
Mr. Reichert very nicely said:
"When you have been the head of a MDAX company,
then you have something to give back, to pass on."
And he hit a nerve there,
because the question of choices is:
How do you find your choices?
How do you know when it's not a choice?
What does a choice mean?
This is extremely important.
Not only in your work life,
but also in your private life.
I wanted to tell you something about this
and perhaps also pose the question:
How can you learn this?
How can you learn to decide,
and how can you unlearn to decide?
This is what I'd like to talk with you about.
I am not allowed to advertise,
but I sat in this building at the top right for 15 years.
This is taken from the Web and so is not confidential.
[Picture of Beiersdorf Headquarters]
Also I don't have any intention to promote products,
but I'll show you one of the leading products
so that you have seen it.
Beiersdorf is a small scale company.
It is the smallest worldwide consumer goods corporation.
It has sales on the order of six billion Euro,
four billion of which come from the Nivea brand.
Nivea exists in every country in the world.
We have about 70 - 80 subsidiaries across the world,
I have spent a lot of time traveling.
But I have also spent time now and then with decision making.
The big question is: how do you get to the top?
I want to make it brief,
but you need to know about a couple of important choices.
The first big choice in my life was not: "get to the top."
The first big choice was
that in 1953 I decided that
I needed to have a Mercedes.
In 1953 it wasn't very common to have a Mercedes.
There was only one person in our area who had one.
He was a director of a factory,
a rather small factory, as I know today.
But he had a Mercedes.
And that was awesome.
Why is that significant here?
Because it's a fundamental way of life.
Not everyone has to emulate it,
it was very materialistic,
and you can only understand it when you know
how crappy the world still was in 1953.
When I started school, there was no currency,
just wheeling and dealing with cigarettes.
When I turned seven, the D-Mark came along,
and suddenly you could buy stuff with paper.
That was an entirely new experience for us.
Though to say, "I want a Mercedes," sounds trivial,
it is indeed an important choice.
On the road to the top
the obvious first choice to my family
was that I should become a lawyer, like everyone else.
I should study in Marburg
because tuition was free -- I am North Hessian.
Well then you can go into the same fraternity as your father.
So everything was fixed and predetermined.
When I was 16 - 17 years old I went through the normal rebellion,
and said, "I want to do something different."
That wasn't so easy at that time,
because outside of Marburg there was only Giessen.
Kassel wasn't there,
and, thank God, Darmstadt.
Darmstadt had the advantage
that is was a long way away from Arolsen
and I would be 200 km away from home.
That's how I decided to go to Darmstadt
to become an industrial engineer.
At that time nobody knew what that was.
Today a couple of people know.
Back then it was quite new and I thougt that was great.
I had no idea what it was
but the name was so great
that I have continued to use it.
After I'd been saying for two years, "I'll be an industrial engineer,"
I finally had to do it.
That's how I went to Darmstadt, and not to Marburg.
It is a relatively difficult choice for someone that age
to rebel and go against their family,
but not unheard of.
The second choice was substantially more difficult.
At that time I was an assistant at the University in Cologne
and should have and wanted to follow a scientific career path.
But I earned a salary of 1024 D-Mark.
My apartment cost me 500 D-Mark.
And my wife was pregnant.
It was easy to see
that 1024 D-Mark was not going to make it.
Then I bumped into an advertisement from Procter & Gamble
that asked in the headline,
"Do you want to earn a lot of money?"
I liked that.
(Laughter)
So then I started working
at Proctor & Gamble, a company that was totally unknown at that time.
At that time they had the Rei plants.
Procter & Gamble was the marketing school of the nation,
even in America.
If someone wanted something,
he went to Procter & Gamble
to learn marketing and then would go somewhere else.
It sounds absurd but there are plenty of examples.
Jeff Immelt from General Electric was an assistant there,
and Margaret Whitman, who is now with Hewlett Packard
was also there.
Thus, it was the school of the nation.
It was great and I worked my way up to product manager,
first in Germany and then in the USA.
The third choice was in 1989,
when Procter & Gamble relocated me to the Soviet Union.
I figured out pretty fast
that that was really not my thing.
Especially since my knowledge of Russian is very limited.
But I was General Manager for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Then a headhunter reached out to me and said
he wanted to offer me a job at Beiersdorf.
After that, I went to Beiersdorf
and was there for the past 15 years.
The most important decision
I had to make in my time with Beiersdorf
was the question: do we sell the company to Procter & Gamble or not?
That was ten years ago.
Here are the headlines from that time.
[Taking over Beiersdorf won't be easy: Kunisch]
It says here, "Kunisch would make it difficult for anyone
to take over Beiersdorf."
That was a very difficult decision.
I knew Procter & Gamble,
and that when Procter & Gamble wants to buy a company,
they buy it.
There is not a single case where they had failed at this.
The question that my wife and I had to answer, was:
Can we fight back, though there is a high probability of failure?
Or do we go along,
with the high probability of earning a lot of money?
That is a very difficulty decision.
Thank God that Beiersdorf is still independent today.
And Beiersdorf stayed independent,
not on my account,
but rather the city of Hamburg stepped in
and laid one billion Marks on the table and bought it.
That was a good investment
because today Beiersdorf continues to be a solid taxpayer in Hamburg.
That wouldn't be the case otherwise.
An extremely difficult decision.
And my last choice was,
as I indicated earlier:
When do I voluntarily quit?
This is also difficult
because when all of a sudden you are no longer truly important,
then you have a problem with that.
Decision making, ladies and gentlemen,
is an extremely challenging subject.
Why is it so difficult?
You know the extremes:
We speak colloquially about the burden of choice,
or we concede the decision making to others.
It is neither one nor the other.
It is, in my opinion,
a necessity, to define our life.
Sometimes we have to decide this.
And it's hard.
Because once you've made a decision, your options are eliminated.
And we like to live with options.
We like to leave things open.
Making the decision ends that,
and that is what makes it so difficult.
Saying, "Yes" is relatively easy.
Saying, "No" is extremely hard,
but extremely important.
The best example is marriage,
as the motto says,
"You can't marry all of them."
So that means a commitment.
And we don't like commitments.
Which is why the modern media allows us
to no longer make commitments,
that is, everything that you do today, with chats, etc.
A very simple example:
Where do we want to go tonight?
What are we going to do tonight?
This is a topic that today you wait
until seven or eight o'clock in the evening to discuss
before you decide.
A long time ago it was different.
A long time ago you would call on the telephone,
but this continuous information,
this always-being-available, didn't exist earlier.
When my first daughter wanted to use the telephone
there was one telephone in the house.
It was in a clear, visible place.
When you wanted to make a call
you had to go to the phone
and the whole family could hear
what you said.
It was uncomfortable.
The second daughter had more luck.
By then we had a cordless phone,
you probably don't know the term anymore,
and you could go into your own room
when the reception was strong enough
and the door was not closed all the way.
But you could retreat.
An entirely different quality of engagement.
Then came the mobile phones,
and today obviously the chat options and the internet
being connected simultaneously with so many,
without their parents knowing.
Back to the very simple question, "What are we doing tonight?"
Where as before you had to decide earlier in the day,
now you don't have to decide until seven o'clock in the evening.
This is something that is helping us
to forget how to make decisions.
And my point here is:
make an effort to -- I will say a few more words about this --
endeavour to make the decisions
even when it hurts.
I'm going to use the economy as an illustration.
There you have to make decisions.
In addition you have to be clear.
We call this strategy.
It is very simple -- make a plan to reach a goal
and you have to consider what will lead to the goal.
You develop options for the strategy,
such as, "Where am I strong? Where is my company strong?
Where are the others weak?"
Then you choose which are the strongest aspects.
And the choices that contribute to the strongest aspects
help to reinforce them,
and these then are the decisions.
That means you need to set a benchmark for the decisions.
It is a choice between alternatives.
We're not talking about emotional choices,
which are also important. I cannot speak to these.
These choices you must make yourself,
but there are rational decisions.
And the guideline for these rational decisions,
your strategy, you must take from your end goal.
My suggestion to you is
that you consider for yourself,
not every day, but maybe every three - four months:
Where do I really want to go?
Where are my strengths?
What are my weaknesses?
How will I be seen from outside?
How will I see myself?
All of these are strategic questions for your personal life,
for your future.
You must choose
and then you must evaluate.
What is actually, really important to me?
That is the hardest part.
What is really important to me?
When you have figured that out
then you can align your choices with that.
Back to my example:
When the Mercedes is really important to you
you have to earn money and you have to say,
I'll take on some hardships in order to earn money,
to earn a lot of money.
You can also practice making choices.
When you sit down on Monday morning once a week
and ask: What do I want to accomplish this week?
And then sit down on Friday and see: What did I accomplish?
Then there are different possibilities.
If you didn't accomplish anything,
then either your goal wasn't right or it wasn't important,
or you weren't honest with yourself.
If you accomplished everything,
the same can be said from the other side.
Meaning, you must consider the question: What do I want accomplish in this week,
in this year, in this life?
What is actually, really important to me?
and then take action based on this framework.
I'd like to invite you to do this.
Begin on Monday morning,
to consider what you're going to do tonight.
It is very simple,
and will lead you, in the long run, to consider:
What am I? What do I want to be?
What do I want to accomplish or not accomplish?
Those are you choices.
Accordingly, in the words of Goethe,
the decision is great and important,
but the execution of it is equally critical.
Otherwise it remains thought simulation.
You need decisions
in order to move beyond the mental exercise
and enter into actual life.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)