By Carolin Fretschner
Germany
Holton-Arms '08
Over the last decades the environmental conservation became a more and more important topic within our society. Not only governments reacted towards the destruction of the environment by signing the Kyoto Protocol or founding the Green Party in Germany but also individuals took part in the movement by separating rubbish or using renewable energies. Nowadays environmental awareness is rising among companies, which begin to advertise for „green“ products. One example for this movement is Osiander, Germany’s tenth largest bookstore, which delivers its books environmentally friendly by cooperating with Greenbooks, the recently founded students’ company of the Uhland-Gymnasium in Tübingen.
As a member of Greenbooks’ management I helped to build up the company and form its three goals. Our first goal is to protect the environment by ensuring a CO2-neutral delivery. We deliver books within Tübingen that are ordered online or in an Osiander store by bike, foot or public transportation. Our second goal is to work efficiently. As all members of Greenbooks still attend school and are enrolled in extra-curricular activities it is important that we work in a timesaving way. We divided the town into 19 different parts. Every of our 60 employees delivers books in his or her residential area. After the lessons in the afternoon, the students usually take the books home and then plan their route. Due to short distances they can now transport more books in less time and earn more money. Our third goal is to learn team spirit, responsibility and how to act as an entrepreneur and also teach these values to our employees.
I personally learned various things: first of all, one cannot prepare oneself perfectly for the beginning of an enterprise; at one point of time you just have to be courageous and start your business. We tried to plan out every little detail and pushed our first week of delivery around two weeks back because we were afraid of not being able to deliver all the books, as we did not have enough deliverers in some parts of the town. Eventually we decided to start and risk a first week of chaos. We have learned from our mistakes that happened during the first few weeks and always improve our work. Another important aspect I learned is how to communicate with and find the right tone for three different parties: representatives of Osiander, employees and the seven other managers. The communication between us eight managers of the organization team turned out to be the most difficult one. We are all on the same level in the management and at first no one dared to make decisions without asking the others about their opinions. Therefore we had to have meetings at least twice a week to discuss the most important matters and to hear everyone’s voice, which was very time consuming. After a while we decided to form expert groups of one or two persons. While one expert group looks after our employees, another takes care of our finances, a third is responsible for representation and our website. The most important thing I learned, however, is that the managers of a firm should be their first employees. They have to believe in the ideals of their company and bear responsibility for their own work and for the work of their employees.
