My book is published – 30 years at a glance

Now it is done. The chronicle of the company over the last 30 years is also my personal chronicle. The basis of the book were these stories, which I wrote down every week over the course of a year. For me, going back through time meant dealing intensively with the past. In doing so, I was able to learn a lot, including trust. No matter what the situation, there are always good and bad aspects to it. The bad things naturally concern me much more intensively. I am and will remain an engineer and have learned to analyze problems, create a concept and then systematically approach and solve the individual sub-projects step by step. Yes, what appears to me to be absolutely systematic and goal-oriented can certainly cause confusion in my immediate and broader environment. I get along well with the staff who have developed trust - just as I have to trust in my staff and in myself. For that I need peace and quiet. The best thing is to keep my hands busy with something that doesn't tax my brain too much, so my thoughts flow and a clear picture appears. That has worked very well for at least the last 30 years.
I am not a trained writer and not a book author. I hired Matthias Pfannmüller for that. He pressed my drafts together with many photos into three books. The first describes my personal history in the context of all the projects I helped initiate. It describes the period from 1991 to 2009. The second book shows the present as we find it today with all the vehicles we produce and the current development projects. It describes the period from 2010 to 2019. The third book reproduces the presentations we enjoyed at our first two Circular Economy Symposia. These are the topics I am currently dealing with. It is about global warming and how I personally and all of us together on our beautiful planet can make the best use of our resources to be able to live in harmony with nature for a long time to come. Our generation in particular was born at a special time. We have it in our hands to change our actions in such a way that we continue to exist on our planet in harmony with nature or else our civilization collapses and a new start will be necessary in a few thousand years. Perhaps some future archaeologist will dig up one of these books and analyze passages from it, drawing conclusions about our time. I hope at least then people will learn from the past and not make the same mistakes over and over again.

Matthias and I went through the texts and the photos many times. Matthias had an exact concept – and so did I. Matthias suggested things - I either accepted or rejected them. We discussed and argued. So it took over a year until the three-part book was finally ready. An exhausting and also very enriching effort.
No sooner was this book finished, and we were already discussing whether we want to squeeze this year's Circular Economy Symposium and the whole year's events between two book covers again. Matthias would contribute the texts and our Jasmin Giger would do the whole layout. There are a lot of interesting events to recount again. The house newspapers, which appear every Monday, would form the framework, again professionally processed. This is the end of the past and therefore also of this column, which I wrote for the 30th anniversary of the company. I am very much looking forward to the future.

I learned from it:

• 30 years go by much faster than I would have ever imagined
• Time is the most precious commodity. It is important to live through it as consciously as possible
• The latest book, the one of the future, has not yet been written.