The Wall Street Journal Europe: a new function

After a few months of thinking, waiting, discussing, holiday schedules and rethinking I decided to accept the job offer I received from the Circulation Marketing Department of The Wall Street Journal Europe. After having led the Distribution Operations team for 5 years it will be an opportunity and a challenge to switch to the marketing side of the company. I will be directly responsible for 2 programs, good for one third of our audited circulation. First program is the Future Leadership Program of The Wall Street Journal (all newspapers going to all the European top universities). Second program is the European Travel Program (all sponsored copies going to the 4 and 5 star hotels in the major European cities). I have been asked to rewrite both programs and put them back in the market.

It is one of the tricks of life to realize that this blog kind of paved the way to this new job. When I started this private and personal blog about management issues more then a year and a half ago, while professionally completely imbedded in the operations side of the company, nobody could have foreseen that I would become responsible for The Future Leadership Program, an area where I will be working daily around topics as management knowledge, training programs, institutes, universities, MBA's etc. (I am even pretty sure that the new line of bosses I will work for haven't any knowledge about the existence of this blog.) So it must have been the power of mind, or the radiation of thoughts and wishes that fertilized the company ground I walked on so one day somebody high up the marketing ladder decided to come down to the operations field with the question to join them. I don't think I ever heard about such a move in our company before. Normally operations people and marketing people don't blend. They support each other, but that doesn't mean they have compatible building blocks. I hope I will grow into being the exception which proves the rule.