Social Table Dancing / Maskshow of the Ministers

Dear Liqui Moly / Meguin family!

"Your products suck and your advertising sucks." Harald Schmidt, is that you? It could be or hidden camera. But it's not - just an anonymous Internet user... Occurs from time to time - occasionally out of the thousands and thousands of comments we receive... I will then politely write back that we can meet in the internet for an exchange of views and argue with facts and figures if necessary. Most of the time nothing more comes back after this. I prefer the praising and appreciative, but of course also the objective and critical letters, I read and answer every single letter. It is nice to communicate with our customers. At the moment we receive hundreds of positive letters every day. Some of them are surprised to get an answer, especially from myself and not just sometime, but on the same day, often even in the same hour.... Seems to have gone out of fashion - such a working style. Sometimes being old-fashioned is not sooo bad...respectful, polite and friendly is always modern!

My Grandma always said: "What you can do today, don't put off till tomorrow". - That's how I work. Everything that comes in, gets processed: Mail by mail, letter by letter, call by call. Nothing is put off and nothing is done later, or at some point. I would not know what has to be done later. I'm follow an empty desk policy, at the end of the day the desk has to be empty...Afterwards I can still think and invent....Maybe tomorrow there will be a much bigger wave of unfinished things to add to the already existing one... And then? "What you have, you have," says the Swabian. At this point it's not about money, but about having things "done."

And because Swabian is such a beautiful dialect, you can also use it very humorously. For example when the social dancing on the table - the Social Table Dancing :-). Actually, it is a physical distance that we should keep at the moment and not a social one. Quite the opposite, now closeness and warmth is needed, the social side of us humans, the human side so to speak. We are not just ruthless egoists crammed together in a big herd, but rather quite tolerable individuals who have a heart for other individuals. Shows itself in the social behavior of individuals (or sometimes not)... so please let us remain social, because the opposite of social is unsocial or even antisocial. Let us show that we have the heart in the right spot, that we are there for our fellow human beings and know what to do. Respect for the other person begins with the immediate answering of questions, but also with the immediate reaction to criticism. Here too, as fast as possible before asap applies... "Due to work overload we are only now able to answer your mail of January 8th". - This was not written by an government office to me at the end of April, but by a good German company. How can I take someone seriously or believe that he cares about something when 20 days are needed to respond to a letter? They don't even think anything by doing this, for them it is normal. A 10-minute job is put off for three weeks... this virus is not to blame for everything.... I, on the other hand, cannot sleep if even a single e-mail - no matter what it is about - goes around in my head unanswered and thus gnaws at my social conscience and my integrity as managing director. There are things that you just don't do and there are things that you have to do immediately. Sometimes it's just a question of upbringing and in our case an enormously important part of our corporate culture.

So please let us remain as we are: Fast, thorough, polite, friendly and the way we want others to threat us...

A heretical question on ministerial comment on a "mask air bridge" for the end: Will now every airplane from China, with too late ordered and too expensive masks or similar "high tech products", welcomed live at the landing by an image-needy B - politician and a crowd of journalists? Without a mask to cover the face, but with 30 cm body distance... a penalty ticket for our minister of defense - that would be something... Or Care packages including chewing gum dropped by our American friends via air bridge over Berlin. Well, hopefully this time the masks are more suitable than the ones that Andi Scheuer received on the tarmac in Munich the other day with tears in his eyes in front of running cameras...

Yours

Ernst Prost