Letters to Mr W. Baumann, CEO Bayer AG (19-22)
19. Bayer’s new mission – its implementation.
Dear Mr. Baumann,
your previous #personnel policy is muffled after the 80s and your #communication policy is based on the findings in this area, especially from the 50s of the last century. Both are shabby chic, but actually much more shabby than chic. Both policies, to sum up, are designed for perhaps idiots, but certainly not for potential innovators. If you accept this shabby chic, you are probably a proponent of the Pareto principle, after 80% of employees are useful idiots and only the remaining 20% could still achieve anything. With this approach, you will also have outsourced everything that could only have to do with innovation. All start ups out, just as a railway manager recently put it ‘aptly’: “You can’t implement such a transformation in the classic corporate structures”. But this is completely wrong, because it either ruins or makes impossible many things in the company.
20. The new generation of employees: Lazy and stupid or resigned?
Dear Mr. Baumann,
what is your idea of the younger generation? Robert Musil said that there are only two options in this world: to despair or to act. If you apply these words to today’s situation, some people despair in their mindfulness, in the exercises that will certainly not lead to really valuable answers, to questions that a critic in “Die Zeit” lists about the latest book by Leif Randt: “In a world where material needs are no longer the problem, all life decisions are concentrated on questions of mindfulness: How does my life feel? Do I still feel myself? Do I live up to my own ideas of a good life? Has my lifestyle balanced ethics and aesthetics in the right way? Have I planned enough spontaneity?” All this will never succeed because, as Wolfgang Jopp put it, without major defeats and crises, there can be no creativity at all, in any sense and in any area, whether private or professional.
21. Employees: Mindfulness egoism versus community spirit with plurality?
Dear Mr. Baumann,
the employees should actually expect a company to provide them with appropriate conditions for their meaningful actions. How else would employees who have a very high level of ‘intrinsic motivation’, ‘above-average creativity’, ‘excellent social skills’ and ‘exemplary entrepreneurship’, i.e. the elite of the new middle class (A. Reckwitz) or those who are striving to move up into this class (a reality that H. Arendt would not like at all), be able to cope at today’s Bayer? With this mission, with this #personnel policy, with this #communication policy? Finally, there is the quote from “The Leopard” by the great G. T. di Lampedusa, a quote which has been and still is so famous, as unfortunately far to rarely implemented in a meaningful way, not only by companies, but also privately: “If we want things to stay the way they are, we need things to change.” This is a very good wake-up call for the real CEO’s and at the same time for those who are so busy with mindfulness exercises. Fight your way back to the reality and don’t get stuck in the Sicilian Baroque.
22. Numb feelings (…) will finally end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity.” Isn’t that just what mindfulness does?
Dear Mr. Baumann,
“Most people want their lives to be problem-free and free of contradictions, their everyday life is exhausting enough. And I always seem to say things that many people prefer to ignore or deny, for self-protection or a secret sympathy. Where are the young people today who have found their own unique language, who criticize and polemicize with relish, who dare to be uncomfortable? (…) They would already exist, but they don’t dare to, because everyone is afraid of everyone, and most of the time it is completely unnecessary.” This is what the writer Maxim Biller says. I think that nobody needs to be afraid of you, dear Mr Baumann, after all? Do they? Otherwise the word of H. Arendt would again apply: “(…) and as if the only active individual decision consisted only in letting go of oneself, as it were, to give up one’s individuality, or to numb feelings (…) will finally end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity.” Isn’t that just what mindfulness does?
