(The president of the university, to which I was appointed as professor at the beginning of 1997, instructed me to remove all references to this university from my website due to my expressions of opinion critical on lockdown with instructions from April 6, 2021 - access on April 8, 2021. As a loyal civil servant who follows official instructions, I will of course comply with this instruction.)
Born: 1960
in: Zeven (Lower Saxony)
My career is untypical for a professor. Here I would like to mention the most important stages in keywords:
- after school without an apprenticeship
- unskilled construction worker, from age of 18 working shifts in chemical industry
- in trade union and politically active, in particular in the peace movement of the 1980s
- professional training as a clerk in industrial companies, organized by employment office
- access to university by the second educational path
- study of business administration and economics
- approx. 9 years of professional experience in accounting, finally as a financial manager in the German
group of an international group of companies
- further education as certified accountant
- Ph.D. doctorate in
part time at an institute for business
informatics
- 1997: Appointed Professor of Financial Accounting and
Management Accounting
appointment letter of January 17, 1997: Professor of Financial Accounting and Management
Accounting with special consideration of international aspects
- 2000 to 2004: technical advisory board member in a scientific Publishing House
- 2001 to 2006: Chairman of the Board of Directors of a Consulting plc
- 2004 to 2005: Lecturer at the Business Academy Oskar Lange in Wroclaw (Akademia Ekonomiczna
im. Oskara Langego we Wrocławiu), Poland
- 2005 - 2014: Author of written training courses for Management Circle plc in Eschborn
- 2019 - Corona: reviewer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the award of
scholarships abroad
In addition, I chaired the Parent Advisory Council of a Primary School and a High School, Secretary of the School Parent Advisory Board of a Comprehensive School, a member of a city school parish council, and vice chairman of a county school parish council. I am married and have three children.
previous courses:
External Accounting:
Accounting according German GAAP
International accounting
consolidated Financial Statement
Management accounting:
Cost accounting
Corporate Planning / Reporting
Investment and Finance
Taxes:
German Taxation
International Taxation
My area of expertise is accounting. Business administration deals with the management of companies. One can compare this with the control of a ship. Both are clumsy and slow to respond to course
changes. Both have no brake. If a big ship goes to the port of New York, the captain can turn off the engine 15 to 20 km beforehand. Both are dependent on external influences, ships of weather
and current, a company of the economy and the competition. Both have to navigate, ie determine the current position and the destination and then calculate the course. The ships have GPS today.
Both need information. The ship has radar and gets weather data. For a company, the information comes from accounting. With general computer deployment, corporate governance is expected to be as
good as the captain of a cargo ship today with radar and GPS.
The accounting of large companies has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Much of this has not been noted by the authors of the textbooks, nor by many of my colleagues. They spend too much time
calculating numbers in class. Companies have been computing computers for more than 30 years. For the students it is of course convenient to get their good grades in the exams with simple
arithmetic tasks. But that's a different topic.
Even the small businesses have been computer for over 20 years. Democratic business theory, which is geared towards the interests of the masses and not a small minority, must respond much more to
their needs than to those of large corporations. 90% of companies in Germany have fewer than 10 employees. If the taxpayer finances science, then these 90% and not the 0.3% large companies with
more than 250 employees need priority support. It is also possible to create technical structures for small businesses that will enable them to generate all the information necessary for good
corporate governance without expensive professionals. This task should pay much more attention to business research.
After my retirement, I want to continue pursuing this goal as far as possible.