It looks like 2007 is going to be a good year globally. International trade is growing, demand for capital goods is increasing and consumption is also on the rise, even in countries of the Second and Third World. The World Bank is even saying that for the first time poverty is decreasing to a measurable extent in the world. Provided of course no world-shattering catastrophes arise. In other words, with a little bit of luck we can count on growth. This by all means positive outlook should not lead us to venture from one prognosis to the next, which might even outplay each other. It should not lead us to adjust guidelines upwards or to drop long-term planning or revise carefully set goals quickly for the sake of some positive press coverage.

If rising demand should actually make for bluer skies and make the worries about the future a bit less burdening, if instead of job cuts new jobs are created, employees and investors equally share good earnings, then we should make as much room as possible for the development of strategies and the pursuit of quality in a conservative way. I do not want to say that quality was not important in recent years. But we also would not be honest, if we denied problems. The continuous push to lower costs, to increase margins in retail so that it can ignite price wars again and again, to escape legal restraints and the curse of the undue shareholder value, has badly bashed-up the thought of quality. Cars of all manufacturers have been called back to the factory in the tenth of thousands, because quality defects threatened security. Fire hazard threatened hundreds of thousand of lap tops. The food industry is covered in scandals so that consumers barely have any trust left in the quality of groceries.

It is high time to bring together quality and truthfulness in order to not leave truthfulness uncoupled from our lived vocabulary. I suggest to inextricably link the original thought of quality with the chances for growth and to ask, if necessary, for a corresponding price.

And one other topic is close to my heart: Let us talk again about quality. It is not old-fashioned to speak of quality. It is not a waste of time. It is not redundant because it actually ought to be matter of course.

Through talking about quality we rediscover our own, I want to say innate relationship to anything of value. I say ‘innate relationship’, because I think quality is rooted in our culture. The keen sense of what is quality has not been obliterated and destroyed. It might have been suppressed as a consequence of decades of abundance prevailing in the First World. We can now rediscover the value of quality. That this is going to cost money is understood, but the customer is willing to pay the price for quality, especially once the improving economy puts money into people’s pockets. And if sales personnel do not slow down the upgrading process in regards to pricing due to being afraid of their own courage. More courage in all respects is in demand. He, who utilized chances during times of economic upswing, is going to be a winner. Manufacturers, retail and consumers in equal measure.