Gabriele Horcher, communication scientist, entrepreneur, speaker, bestselling author.
Who are you as a person in private and what do you do in business?
The transitions between private and business are fluid. In short, I was born in 68, am married, a dog person and a self-confessed Offenbach resident. Four out of five working days I concentrate on my work as managing director of my communications agency. There are 18 colleagues with me and we specialise in business-to-business communication for IT and high-tech companies.The other days of the week I use to advance my second career as a speaker. My current impulse lecture and absolute favourite topic is called: "Overcoming and setting boundaries - artificial intelligence in sales and marketing". I don't want to say that I don't have a private life, but it is very full.
What is your most important belief or do you have a success quote?
My most important belief is: "It depends on how you see it". It depends on how you feel about it. I am free to decide how I feel about a situation, whether I want or need to get angry, whether I keep my cool or even take something positive from it. This belief system has often helped me.
What was the biggest aha moment or your personal game changer in your professional career?
I can tell you about two personal game changers. One event happened a long time ago. When I was 12, I saw the now classic film "Pyjamas for Two" with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. This film fascinated me - and convinced me that I definitely wanted to have my own agency later on. The film had everything: fun, intrigue, drugs, sex, and at the end the woman finds the man for life. With this emotional goal in mind - I didn't know the hard facts about working in an agency back then - I chose all my school endeavours, part-time jobs, my studies and my jobs. In 2000, I founded the Möller Horcher agency with my partner Thomas Möller - and in 2002 there was the personal happy ending: the wedding.The second game-changer was not so long ago - just two years ago. I have been living my dream with my own communications agency for 18 years. I have been preparing this dream for 20 years. That's when you sometimes get the idea to ask if that's all there is to it. Admittedly, my friends and family thought I was crazy when I told them that I now want to go one step further and make my hobby as a speaker my future profession. But I see it this way: I still have so much time until I'm 90, it has to be used wisely. There is plenty of time for a second career.
Which values are important to you and why?
Trust is very important to me. Without trust, no good relationship or good cooperation is possible. I am not a person who controls or constantly questions. But I also trust that I will be informed if something is not going well.
What is your most important message that you want to send out to the world?
It is important to realise that change is omnipresent. There is little point in resisting it. Revolutionary change is actually good, because it is not the big that eat the small, but the fast that eat the slow. So we are well advised to keep time and resources free to deal with change.As the original PR agency, we had to decide whether to offer SM with. Many PR agencies that resisted it then no longer exist.When it comes to AI in sales and marketing, there is even more urgency to the decision. To make this comprehensible, I use the Okland story in my talk. The true story about a baseball team in the US that had no money to afford top players. They decided out of necessity to sign players based on a completely different set of criteria - selected by an algorithm. This team, selected by an algorithm, managed to become the first team ever to win 20 games in a row in the American League.Unfortunately, Oakland could not enjoy its success for long. Soon, many other baseball teams adopted the same algorithmic approach. In baseball, there is no going back. Only the first in their industry, niche or environment will have great success with it! We have to react to changing conditions with changed behaviour - or even better, act.
How do you deal with mistakes and the consequences?
Hm, derived from my belief "It depends on how you see it", there are no failures or mistakes. In my 18 years of self-employment - we are currently celebrating the anniversary of our agency - there are new challenges every day. I have learned to treat each challenge individually.
How do you make decisions and what helps you?
I decide very quickly on the basis of my gut. Generally, it helps me to sleep on it again.
Is there aproject you are currently passionate about or would like to take forward?
Yes! Since 2018, I have been taking one day more per week every two years for my lectures, thus handing over more and more responsibility to my colleagues in the agency. I am burning for everyone to be able to approach the topic of change in communication Artificial Intelligence in Sales and Marketing without fear. AI is now changing the way we work, and AI will also drastically change communication in the future.
How would you briefly explain the advantages of PIM?
Systems such as a PIM (product information management system), for example, which make this bare data available quickly and easily, then come much closer to the information needs of AIs than, for example, a brochure or a website. The prerequisite for smooth communication between AIs here - even more so than today - is the rapid availability of correct, up-to-date and relevant data. The basis of AI is therefore always data. If you only feed an AI with bad data, you can only achieve bad results. According to the motto garbage in - garbage out. Fortunately, there is also the support of AI here, which helps with the modelling, cleaning and onboarding of data in PIM or other systems, despite different formats, structures or terminologies.
What important advice would you like to give our readers?
Last summer I did something that was unthinkable for me until then: I jumped out of a plane. A tandem parachute jump was never on my list of things I absolutely wanted to do. Quite the opposite. If I had planned the jump, I would have found a thousand excuses not to do it.Why did I jump anyway? I accompanied a friend to his first tandem jump to take photos of the experience. With my big camera I was allowed to go everywhere: Behind the scenes, into the training sessions, right onto the landing field.I saw the euphoric glowing faces of the people who jumped, and I built trust with the guides. When someone cancelled and a jump became available, I said: If I wasn't too heavy, I would jump, too. It soon turned out that my weight was still in the tolerance zone and even the suit fit me. So without losing face, I wouldn't have been able to get out of the act. So I jumped, and it was a lot of fun. I mean, from a distance, the topic of artificial intelligence is perhaps as bad for some people as the idea of skydiving is for me. But if I don't deal with what scares me, I can never overcome this fear. So the most important advice for all readers is this: Deal with what scares you and fear loses its power.
More about Gabriele Horcher at gabriele-horcher.de.
