Hans Rusinek wants to fill our economy and working with it with more meaning and a sense of responsibility. As a management consultant and transformation researcher, he advises and publishes on the question of meaning in a changing economic and working world. He is doing his doctorate on meaning and work at the Institute for Business Ethics in St. Gallen. As an author, he is one of the editors-in-chief of Transform, a print magazine that deals with questions of happiness in life, sustainability and social change, and is the recipient of the Ludwig Erhard Foundation’s Business Journalism Award.
Hans Rusinek in the Premium Speakers interview
1. What are the core themes of your talks?
We are at a threshold, the logics of the old time are still very strong, but we see that they are not taking us forward – and the new order is not yet born. Or only visible to very attentive eyes.
I am excited by the transformations that will define our working and economic world. What drives me is the optimistic conviction that we can face not only a disruptively different, but also an entirely better future (if we want it!) – for planet, people and sustainable profit.
In my research and consulting on the future of work, I look at the challenges in the current world of work: dominated by crises of meaning, generational conflicts, skills shortages and skills gaps. I want to show how we can redeem the promise that lies in good work: the promise of a conscious and creative engagement with our world. For example, I explain from the experience of various projects how to turn employees into a movement.
2. Which audiance or which branch do you reach with your speech?
I am addressing all organisations that are in transformation and all people in these organisations who are looking for new better ways of doing business and work. In recent months, I have been working with a tech company on hybrid ways of working and on the question: Back to the office or work from anywhere? With an NGO, I’m trying to systematically anchor innovations in development cooperation. And with an automotive company, I’m working on the shift from a car manufacturer to a mobility provider.
In my talks, I look for the common big story in all these experiences, but I also tell many little stories, for example, what I learned about innovation culture in an Iraqi bakery, how I persuaded an entire DAX board to take its shoes off, what Hannah Arendt would say about LinkedIn, or why the nappucino could perhaps save the world.
3. Are you a PREMIUM SPEAKER? Where do you get your insights from?
A good speaker must first and foremost be a good listener, otherwise where would he or she get inspiring knowledge and exciting stories? This is why a speaker is never just a speaker.. I see my role as building bridges between different worlds of experience: I combine the perspective of a researcher on the future of work (University of St.Gallen) with my experience as a strategy consultant (Boston Consulting Group/BrightHouse), and with my involvement in ThinkTanks (e.g. ThinkTank 30 of the Club of Rome Germany). As a speaker, you were able to find me in the last 8 years on the stages of e.g. TEDx, the Handelsblatt Change Congress, Creative Entrepreneurship and the ZEIT Future Festival.
4. What will be in the future? Does «time» play an important role in your work?
Don’t believe anyone who tries to tell you what the future looks like! There is no map that has drawn the future for us and tells us where we are going. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the future.
We think we need such a map to set off into the future, and as long as it doesn’t exist, we don’t do anything. But what we actually need is something much better: a compass! It tells us what our direction is, where we want to go, what our values are and how we can act accordingly. With this we can set out. Into our future. The future is an attitude, not a discovery: if we don’t invent the future ourselves out of our values, someone else will do it for us, competitors, media, politics – and it will be their future and not ours.
5. Tell us your life motto? What do you want to give your listeners to take with them?
Our lives, just like our economies, are far too dynamic and far too much a voyage of discovery to be pinned down to one motto.
But what can perhaps be a helpful rule of life on these diverse paths is what the author Roger Willemsen, who sadly died much too early, once said:
The challenge is not to get along, but to not get along, i.e. to walk every path yourself, to gain every yardstick yourself, to create every value yourself.