UnRisk's Culture of Helping

Remember our Agenda 2014: package and disseminate know how.

I just read the January-February 2014 issue of the HBR magazine - the cover: A Great Place To Work, about building high-performace cultures in organizations.

Making collaborative generosity the norm

 Nice to read that our intuitive decisions shall become a norm. It is about unleashing technologies, innovation and know-how.

The trickiness of this business challenge: we extend our internal culture to clients and partners and even beyond, but we need to understand that helping is two-sided. Help-providers and help-receivers need to change roles. At UnRisk, people have an array of helping networks.

Take Michael Schwaiger, UnRisk product manager and head of application development as an example - he is also providing first hand support and use trainings. In addition, he provides internal trainings for developers and conducts workshops with clients on future requirements.

Help quants leverage their numerics

The UnRisk Academy at the other hand provides views behind the curtain - about principles, approaches and critical implementations regarding financial modeling, computational finance, hybrid, domain specific programming, high-performace computing, …   in classes for quants, quant developers,   model validators, financial engineers, product controllers and risk managers, as well as the UnRisk teams.

A reference class: A Workout in Computational Finance has been developed recently, after Michael and Andreas have written their book.

Believe me, as business developer, I enjoy this seminars and workshops. What I hope to give back: insight into marketing, promotion, brand promising, …

The helping foxtrot

In a dance one partner enables the other to move and synchronize. This is the secret behind a helping culture.

There is a cold hard truth: some have more talent than others. I love Jazz and especially sax .. Once my   co-operators gave me a sax as a gift. And I was so enthusiastic, but I found out quite quickly: (after many h practice) I could play sax but never play like gifted sax players: Archie Shepp, Julius Hemphill or John Zorn.

So, I returned to listening and discussing music ( I have not played for 20 years now). But I know that those who play understand music better and I like those who do not let me feel it.

It's a matter of mutual expectations and sensitivity to each other's reaction.