Although I had the fortune to travel quite a bit and see many parts of this world, I wouldn’t presume to be able to tell you exactly the best places to live on this planet. So I leave it up to the professionals and picked the annual ranking of Mercer. The New York based company is the world’s largest human …

The ‘Doing Business’-report, published annually since 2003 by the World Bank, is examining the state of health of economies. What makes this study noteworthy is the fact, that the diagnostics of countries is for once not based on visible features such as growth or macroeconomic parameters as the public debt but of underlying and embedded characteristics like the regulatory system, …

63 year old Xi Jinping Is the most powerful man in China. He is the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the Chairman of Chinas Central Military Commission and the President of the People’s Republic of China. But the ‘Paramount Leader’ has another quality that is not yet really acknowledged by the public. Xi Jinping plays his role as a …

Leadership is the single most important human-capital issue in a company or organization, it’s a critical part of the organizational health, which is an important driver of the company’s performance and/or shareholder returns. Well, nothing new under the sun, you might think, because phrases like these are well known and appear in every second ‘how-to’-book about management. Therefore, it’s of …

In the first week of April 1976, exactly 40 years ago, an ordinary house at Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, was the starting point of an extra-ordinary journey. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first 50 ‘Apple I’ personal-computers there.   The rather unusual name for the company had its roots in Steve Jobs fruitarian diet. He had …

Since last night, the term ‘Panama-Papers’ is buzzing around the globe. The massive security breach of an obscure law firm called ‘Mossack Fonseca’ based in Panama City with more than 11 million documents shows how a global industry sells financial secrecy and anonymity to powerful people from celebrities and sports stars like Lionel Messi to ordinary billionaires, prime-ministers, fraudsters and …

Reputation, or the overall quality or character as seen or judged by people in general, is something a company has to work hard on for years, but it can be easy destroyed in days, as the example of Volkswagen’s emission scandal recently demonstrated. Each year, the private ‘Reputation Institute’ (founded 1997) publishes a ranking of the most reputable companies worldwide …

Gold: Best Quarter in 30 Years   Yesterday marked the close of the first quarter in 2016 in which the 3 C’s (Commodities, China and Central banks) were in focus. Among the winners in financial markets is gold. After the very weak 2015, gold came back to 1’235 USD per ounce and climbed almost 17% in the first 3 months …

‘We are in the process of amusing ourselves to death’   This quote by Neal Postman, a former professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University, is over 30 year old. Postman’s concern was that everything that was important has been reduced by television to a level of trivial entertainment – politics, religion, news, education. ”When a population …

27 percent..   In May and June this year, Romania’s competitiveness in Europe will most likely be the topic of countless conversations across the country. After all, on May 10th, the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 kicks off at the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, Sweden. And exactly one month later, on June 10th, the ‘Euro 2016’ opener in the Stade de France between …