German authorities are stepping up preparations for emergency cash deliveries in case of a blackout to keep the economy running, four people involved said, as the nation braces for possible power cuts arising from the war in Ukraine.
The plans include the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, hoarding extra billions to cope with a surge in demand, and possible limits on withdrawals, one of the people said.
The cut in Russian gas supplies has Germany enacting the second phase of their gas emergency plan. What do these plans entail?
On 23 June, Germany triggered the second stage of their emergency gas plan in response to the cut in Russian gas supplies since 14 June and the high price levels. A gas crisis team, which was already set up when the first emergency level was declared in late March, meets daily to monitor and assess the situation.
While the security of supply is currently still guaranteed, “the situation is tense”, according to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. If the Russian gas supply remains low, it will complicate achieving storage level targets by winter. Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection Robert Habeck called the current situation “serious”, referring to gas as a “scarce commodity”.
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses the 25 year plan he developed while a student at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and why you should veer away from such plans. Cook spoke as part of his class reunion at the school.
The journey was not predictable. The only thing you can really do is prepare. Ebb and flow. Lots of things change. Have a North Star. Find your journey.
Planning was one of the cornerstones of management, but it’s now fallen out of fashion. It seems rigid, bureaucratic, and ill-suited to a volatile, unpredictable world. However, organizations still need some form of planning.
And so, universally valuable, but desperately unfashionable, planning waits like a spinster in a Jane Austen novel for someone to recognize her worth. The answer is agile planning, a process that can coordinate and align with today’s agile-based teams. Agile planning also helps to resolve the tension between traditional planning’s focus on hard numbers, and the need for “soft data,” or human judgment.
Arguably the most natural and powerful form of learning is through experience, or more precisely through reflection on doing. This is also known as experiential learning.
The Atlantic. 2012. In 2010, the U.S. adopted a new tactic in southern Afghanistan: it began to bulldoze entire villages to clear them of IEDs. The policy — reminiscent of Vietnam, of destroying villages to save them — spoke to a deeper issue with how the war was being fought.
Short-term objectives were emphasized over long term planning or consequence management. Destroying villages carries enormous long-term costs for a region, and the U.S. military just wasn’t paying attention to what those would be.
Harvard Business Review. 2015. Thirty years ago, no less a business guru than Peter Drucker weighed in, skewering short-termism in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
“Everyone who has worked with American management can testify that the need to satisfy the pension fund manager’s quest for higher earnings next quarter, together with the panicky fear of the raider, constantly pushes top managements toward decisions they know to be costly, if not suicidal, mistakes,” he wrote.
November 2022. Yahoo Finance. Ways of working in Germany have entered a state of constant change due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in digitalization, making digital transformation to improve employee experience increasingly essential, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
The Atlantic. 2016. There was a time, half a century ago, when what was good for many American corporations tended to also be good for America. Companies invested in their workers and new technologies, and as a result, they prospered and their employees did too.
Now, a growing group of business leaders is worried that companies are too concerned with short-term profits, focused only on making money for shareholders. As a result, they’re not investing in their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce profits temporarily. And this, the business leaders say, may be creating long-term problems for the nation.
November 2021. Reuters. More than half of German companies doing business abroad are suffering severe problems in their supply chains or logistics, pushing them to diversify suppliers, shorten delivery routes and even relocate their own production, a survey showed on Tuesday.
The German economy has boomed on the back of globalisation over the past decade. But pandemic-related disruptions in the worldwide network of supply chains that used to turbo-charge its growth engine are now proving a critical weakness.