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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 …

Just in case you still think that the hundreds of TV channels available to you via your remote-control are basically here to inform or entertain you – think again! With a few exceptions, the tv-channels are designed primarily as a platform for advertisers and their tv-spots, interrupted by movies, news, documentations or silly shows overloaded by product-placement. Did you ever …

When it comes to the world’s richest people, I assume you’ve read or heard several times already, that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is on top of the list – and this for quite some time now. But I assume as well, that you’d have difficulties to name the richest people in Europe. That’s why I introduce to you the ‘fattest …

From Alipay to Bitcoin – even with growing digital possibilities around, today still almost 85% of all retail payment transactions worldwide are done with cash, representing about 60% of total retail transaction-value. But these global figures are changing quite a bit when we look at different countries. According to a report by ‘Mastercard’, presented at a recent conference called ‘the journey …

On Tuesday morning, Islamic State terrorists attacked Brussels airport and a metro train, killing around 35 people and wounding hundreds in the deadliest attacks ever seen in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. French President Francois Hollande: ‘The whole of Europe has been hit.’ And the financial markets? The USD gained little vs the EUR and stocks in Europe …