.....continued
Many experiments, publications, and teaching sessions later I could no longer escape the call for obligatory military service in the Austrian army. On my 30th birthday, a cold winter day, I was issued my military gear at 7am in the morning and life changed dramatically....
Initially I was merely trying to survive the drills and long walks with heavy gear witnessing many younger recruits who collapsed under pressure. After four months as “Private Dr. Seelos” (Austria is very formal - even in the army), I was asked to volunteer for a special mission in Iraq. The United Nations requested the assistance of a bioweapons (BW) expert to support the hunt for BWs in Iraq. I was the only one who matched the profile...
More about that chapter of my journey here>>
Spending years between Iraq and the UN HQ in New York was a slightly “unreal” experience. When Iraq finally kicked us out, I did not feel like returning to my comfortable tenured position as an AssociateProf at the U of Vienna. But what to do now? There really was no job market for BW experts, at least not with an Austrian passport....
I stayed in New York and joined a start-up “Transclick.com” to satisfy my emerging curiosity for the world of business - a steep learning curve. I discovered whole new sets of competencies that I was not aware I had. After the crash in 2000, I returned to Europe to join Siemens as a strategy consultant but was soon hired away into the senior management team of British Telecom Global Solutions Germany. As a team of three, we integrated and reorganized the managers of the newly acquired German company Viag Intercom.
Today, I am back in Academia discovering the world of the Social Sciences - an amazingly different way of doing science and a much more discursive, political, and “relational” approach to publishing compared to the Natural Sciences. What inspires me most, is to find ways of adopting the mechanism-based approach of causal explanations that I knew from the Natural Sciences and to develop methods of using this perspective for social phenomena. I have been spending much time in developing countries to learn from amazing and unusual organizations. My motivation was to generate managerial insights on how innovative business models can bring progress to the poor. I am also interested in novel business models of social entrepreneurs and their collaborations with established companies. More recently, I started to apply and to further develop these insights in the philanthropic and development sectors to provide strategic decision-support to managers.
