Column: What worries Würmser
Tattoo, original sin, hippster beard
So, IT nerds are doing away with shipping. And very quickly. Said a professor from TU Berlin recently at the 6th National Conference on Freight Transport and Logistics in Neuss. They are pierced and tattooed, young and, of course, ingenious - just as you would imagine a nerd to be. You prefer to meet them in Silicon Valley, where they have long been working on the ultimate logistics algorithm. Which is why the media, professors and logistics managers have recently been making pilgrimages there, growing funny hippster beards and putting on glasses that they would almost certainly never expect their own children to wear. Back home, people are happy to hang up their ties, hang out with start-ups and conjure up the downfall of someone or other. Freight forwarding is an obvious choice, as it has been something like the original sin of logistics since the fall of mankind, when freight forwarders played the bad guy in the crime scene. It is to blame for the public's resistance to logistics centers, parking lots or road construction, certainly for the fact that young people in Germany have no desire to work in logistics, and even for the bad weather.
Logistics companies, especially their protagonists, want to give themselves and the industry a new image. Hipper, more digital, younger. Fine. But where does this sudden tendency towards self-denial come from? Why does the logistics community prefer to believe in the ingenuity of others rather than its own? And why are tattoos and piercings, of all things, supposed to improve the image of an industry whose core value propositions are safety and efficiency? The guarantee of untainted and affordable products on the plate, full stores and shelves, global competitiveness, jobs and the good feeling that everything is organized efficiently and runs reliably in the background. In fact, freight forwarders are researching more intensively than ever, developing IT systems and even logistics hardware, which ten years ago would have been considered pretty crazy. No freight forwarder, let alone logistics service provider, was as well positioned ten years ago as it is today and will be in ten years' time. Many will actually not survive digitalization. Not for lack of piercings and tattoos, but for lack of aggressiveness and because they have stuck to their core business for too long.
But hello: Germany is the logistics world champion and, despite all claims to the contrary, young people in real life may not think logistics is incredibly important, but it is actually quite cool, as a survey of students from various disciplines revealed. And get this: at the Meet the CEOs@CeMAT talk between top managers from the industry and more than 150 students in Hanover in June, a job in logistics was actually the top choice. Where is the cheering?
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