While I am still utterly happy and cheerful and looking forward to the IFERA, an excellent opportunity has presented itself to do what I find most fascinating, inspiring and meaningful: facilitate the accumulated knowledge from the conference to land with the illustrious audience of entrepreneurs, who can very much apply this knowledge tackling the challenges of their business. Less than a week after IFERA, I will be at the Klosterpforte in Marienfeld, standing in front of entrepreneurs at the Oak Horizon Unternehmer Forum, with one assignment – to take what will have been discussed in a room full of researchers and make it land for a room full of people running companies. The setting is, by design, different from most business events: the former monastery walls invite reflection and challenge you to deliver a performance worthy of such an exquisite setting. You might recognise the exercise: it is what I do every now and then on this blog under the heading From Science to Practice, with a few important caveats: the format is larger, the content will be condensed and not known even to me 5 days before I attempt this endeavour.

If there is one thing I have always found most crucial – in academia, in work, in life, in (yes) the universe and everything – it is the ability to transfer knowledge. I still remember, with mixed feelings, those university courses that demanded exactly this skill from us. I applauded them in principle. I sometimes hated them in practice, especially as someone who had joined a master's program in Germany from a different track than most of my classmates, which meant the pool I was trying to transfer from looked nothing like theirs. (A story for another post.) But I have never doubted that those courses were teaching the right thing: it is the application of knowledge, the ability to connect what you've just discovered with what you've already known, the deduction of first principles, the recognition of the opportunity to allow the cumulative knowledge to grow incrementally that make the difference.

What is striking, every time, is where transfer eventually leads as one small spring flows into a bigger river and then becomes a waterfall. You can start anywhere. At results – the numbers, the outputs, what a company actually delivers. At processes – how decisions get made, how work flows, who talks to whom, how communication is lived. At resources – the capital, the people, the time, their allocation and their dedication. And no matter where you start digging, the spade always hits values, sitting under everything else – and sometimes the hit casts a spark which ignites everything. What this company believes it is for – and how congruent this belief is vs. its actions. What it refuses to compromise – and what hits it is ready to take. What it wants to carry into the next generation, even when everything else changes – and what this resolution to think of next generations reveals about the company.

Oak Horizon's framing for this year's forum – Capital, Culture, Shareholder Logic – is, when you look closely, three different shafts dug into the same ground. Capital is a values question, because the real choice is whose money, on whose terms, for whose vision. Culture is a values question, because it will define its posture which will be carried in a company's processes. Shareholder logic is a values question, because the people in the room have to decide (and preferably agree) together what the company is actually for. The day's theme says it outright – Werte erfolgreich in die Zukunft übertragen, transferring values successfully into the future. It is, in other words, an event about the hardest knowledge transfer there is.

Which is why this short impulse, closing the loop between an academic conference and a room full of operators, feels like the assignment where my human side is most called for – as it resonates straight with my values. The pool I transfer from has been changing shapes and settings many times since my university days. The dedication and the conviction behind them have only strengthened their roots, like an oak tree does.