2122303 – Business Administration for Engineers and IT Professionals – Betriebsmanagement für Ingenieure und Informatiker

Are you determined to take on leadership positions in for-profit-companies in an unpredictable 40-plus year career? Engineers with additional business, finance, problem-solving, communication, social, and leadership know-how, skills and judgment, with competence and integrity have a great competitive advantage. Making strategic contributions accelerates and protects your career. This seminar is based on the experiences in my long international management career. In business, you are dealing with uncertainty (which creates fear because it means loss of control). 90% of the problems that managers face is ambiguous — you don’t even know what the real problem is. While the financial tasks are mostly deterministic, the other tasks prepare you for your future job and help you develop judgment. You are dealing with people (we humans are emotional and only a bit logical). You will not produce results yourself, but through your employees in your organization that you designed to achieve the goals your boss gave you. In about 40+ years of your career, you will have about 20 different jobs with always new requirements and mostly new bosses and employees to adapt to. The risk of failure and getting fired is high. For possible promotions, you must be in a STAR position in the respective job: You have to produce top results, AND you need to be perceived as a High Potential and as capable of strategic thinking by your bosses. In the AI age, insight, systems thinking, judgment and creativity are particularly important — understanding the complexities of a matter and being able to approach it from a variety of perspectives. If you want to get more than just credits for your degree and create a flexible, broad basis for your career and are willing to involve yourself intensively, then this seminar will be of great benefit to you in the long term. A project team in a company will win together or lose together. We will simulate this situation in your group work. You will in small mixed groups of 3 or 2 deal with business cases in different industries, in different business functions and at different management levels, to prepare you as broad and as adaptable as possible for your unpredictable future. You will take turns leading the group as facilitator. This will give you some experience with leading a team. Participants in a group will receive the same grade for their group result. 3-minute presentations plus discussion of the group results where you will learn to focus on the core of a matter and to confidently deal with unpredictable tough questions (and possibly also harsh criticism and ugly provocations) will harden you for real-life career-defining events on the job and will reduce your fear of public speaking. With every presentation and Q&A (in English), you will become better at presenting and discussing confidently and develop your Executive Presence. Presenters will get individual grades for their presentation slide sets. The overall grade corresponds to the arithmetic mean. No final exam. You will acquire a wealth of timeless know-how in a short period of time. To achieve this, you have TWO OBLIGATIONS: You will attend each of the eight sessions. You will be committed to contributing to your group's success in working on the business cases. In addition to material on the business cases, you get extensive material for future self-study. From time to time, I will post new material at ILIAS or update existing material. Please check this occasionally. I speak English, the material is mostly both English and German. Some slides are German only. You can speak or write in any German, English or a mixture. 8x Tue 09:45 – 13:15. We might change beginning and end to cope with participants’ needs. 28.10.2025, 11.11., 25.11., 09.12., 23.12., 20.01.2026, 03.02., 17.02.2026 Building 20.20, 2nd floor, IMI room 267