COSMO Principles for Success

• 1. Take Smart Decisions
  Taking the right decisions is the foundation for every successful business.
  
  But at the crucial moment in which everything is possible, you never know if you are choosing the right one. To make sure that we take as many right decisions as possible, we are following the principle of taking smart decisions.
  
  Smart decisions are based on confidence, empathy, experience, data and facts, but never on fear, opinions, politics or ego!
  
  Taking smart decisions does not mean that you will always be right. Failure is the natural partner of taking decisions. Learning from failure and improving is a smart way to come to right decisions. Fail smart-learn fast-improve fast.
  
  In our dynamic and transforming world we will only succeed if we are fast and agile. This also means that our decisions have to be smart, fast and bold!
  
  Question your motives before you take your decision:
  

  
  
  1. Would I do so, if this were my company?
  
  
  2. Is my decision the best for our customers, my colleagues and our company?
  
  

  
  If you can answer these questions with a definite YES, then be bold and decide smart!
• 2. Build great teams
  Great teams are the foundation for great results.
  
  In great teams everyone knows exactly what to do to make the team more than just the sum of its parts. The secret of building a great team – and not just a team – is to find the right people with the right skills and attitudes for the right tasks, objectives and roles.
  
  Finding the right person for the right tasks is based on smart decisions. This also applies to the team leadership. In a great team every team member has the freedom to decide smart in their area of responsibility. A great team shares the responsibility for success and failure. Great teams share knowledge, experiences and results with each other and others. A great team collaborates and communicates proactively inside and outside of the team. It helps every team member to do their best and is focused on excellent results.
  
  Great teams get things done and make things happen! They inspire each other and others. Great teams care for each other and create an atmosphere of openness, fairness and trust. In a great team there is no room for politics or egos!
  
  Great teams ensure that every team member gets better, outgrows themselves and shine!
  
  Great teams are aligned with other teams and with the overall strategy and vision of the COSMO CONSULT Group! Great teams unleash the power of people!
  
  In our business we are always working in teams. Whether you are a part of an organizational team, project team, competence team, One COSMO team, local team, international team or customer team, the principles of building great teams are always the same. To achieve fantastic results, we must continuously improve our ability to build great teams. Everyone in a team is a team builder! As a company and as a group we are one team – One COSMO.
  
  It is the responsibility of every person in our organization to build great teams and create the foundation for impressive results.
• 3. Go for excellence
  Go for excellence or strive for excellence describes our ambition to strive to do the best we can in every area of our business and personal lives.
  
  It is our ambition to provide the best service, the best consulting, the best products and the best place to work in our industry. This ambition has nothing to do with arrogance or the idea of being the best. It rather determines what we aim to deliver in humble and deep respect to our customers, partners and team members.
  
  Don’t your customers deserve the best service they can get? Or the best solution for their business, their people or their strategy or for all of it? And what about our colleagues? Don’t your colleagues deserve the best work environment we can create? For sure, what is best is not easy to determine. But it is also not about a fact, rather an attitude or a naturalness that we believe. We want to create solutions that our customers not just use, but love! To inspire them to do things better and improve their businesses.
  
  We want to leave our comfort zone and go to where the magic is. Magic arises when great teams do great things for great people. Going for excellence also means permanent personal and organizational improvement. A culture of permanent improvement requires a growth mindset. We must embody a culture of continuous dynamic learning. That also includes learning from failures. We need to use our curiosity to understand and our empathy to feel what is great for others to provide true excellence.
  
  Going for excellence takes a great team that takes smart decisions and leverages the power of people!
• 4. Maintain a growth mindset
  Maintaining a growth mindset - what does this mean exactly?
  
  A growth mindset describes a dynamic learning culture. The intention behind this is that every single one of us has the ability, the attitude and the courage to overcome limits and obstacles and rise to every challenge in helping our company to grow. It is all about our individual growth. This includes the belief that everybody can grow. Only if everyone is able to grow individually in their role and life, we will grow as a company.
  
  Maintaining a growth mindset means to realize our personal passion, and to use COSMO as a platform to pursue this passion. It is about self-reflection and finding out what drives and inspires us as a person. It is about what we love! Because enthusiasm is the best stimulant for our brains, hearts and hands.
  
  Enthusiasm and passion are highly contagious and incredibly energetic! A growth mindset releases the energy dormant in each one of us and connects it with our mission, vision and our common purpose.
  
  You and your enthusiasm make the difference!
• 5. Be curious
  We humans are curious as a species.
  
  Curiosity makes personal and social development happen. Wholesome curiosity stems from openness, empathy and readiness to learn. However, it not just about asking questions and finding answers, but also about care and showing interest in the people and the world around us, our company, our business, our customers, our technologies, our solutions etc. Being curious means being able to listen, to understand and to learn, but also being open-minded and impartial.
  
  A dynamic learning culture is based on curiosity.
  
  The focus of all our business actions must be on the curiosity and the desire to meet our customers’ desires and needs with great solutions and services. And the only way to do is to engage with true curiosity and empathy in what they need today and in future. We must step up our curiosity and empathy to develop a deep understanding for our customers' needs. The more we know about our customers, technologies, partners and team members the better we can help.
  
  Innovation is always based on curiosity.
  
  Curious people are natural innovators. The innovative environment we work in allows us to freely unfold our curiosity for new technologies, new solutions, new companies and new people. We have to make proper use of this advantage. Our customers value innovation, not tradition. We have to leverage our curiosity to think outside the box, to innovate and to improve us every day, as humans and as a company.
  
  We must use our customers' enthusiasm to captivate them so that they too can look beyond their own nose and accompany us in our innovation process.
  
  It is our ambition to be the most curious and innovative company in our industry. It is you, who can make that happen!
• 6. Do it with passion
  Passion is the ultimate energizer for everything we do.
  
  If we do things with passion, we will have more fun, feel more satisfaction and get much better results. When we talk about passion as a company value, people often say: “I cannot show my passion by pushing a button!” We agree 100 percent!
  
  Passion is something that has to come from the inside. It is about what you like, what you believe in, what makes you curious and what you love – it is about your personal mission.
  
  Passion is something that is contagious and highly inspiring. We all have the mission to create an environment and a culture where every individual can find their passion on a personal journey. We all spend a lot of our time and energy at our jobs, working with passion, unleashing the power of people and giving all of us more satisfaction, more fun and much better results.
  
  Passion is the prerequisite to inspiring others – to inspiring people to make companies more successful. It is about fulfilling our purpose as a company and finding personal appreciation and satisfaction.
  
  You can only ignite in other's the fire that burns in yourself! The passion is in you – find it – and you will be successful!
• 7. Put People in the center
  When it comes to success, it is all about people!
  
  In our business we work with different people every day. We want to inspire people and we believe that if we are able to inspire people, we can make companies more successful. Because we believe that people make the difference.
  
  We could also say: “We want to inspire people, to make people more successful, so that they make their companies more successful.” There are many areas in our business where we have to put people in the center.
  
  First,
  
  We must act as humans, with openness, honesty, curiosity, humbleness and deep respect towards every person we are working with. We have to overcome borders or bias and truly engage with empathy and compassion. If we put people in the center, we take care of their desires and needs but also of their sorrows and fears.
  
  Empathy is the universal value to adequately deal with emotions everywhere, whether at work or at home.
  
  Second,
  
  If we are creating software or solutions for the business of our customers, we always have to ask ourselves: “Is this solution human centric, is it inspiring for users, will it make our customers more successful and are we fulfilling their desires and needs?” We have to answer these questions with self-reflection and empathy!
  
  Third,
  
  Building trust and sustainable relationships. Acting with integrity, reliability and professionalism is the foundation for respect – and trust in relationships with our customers and the people we are working with.
  
  Trust in relationships is the prerequisite for a human centric business.
  
  Fourth,
  
  Take people seriously! Listen carefully and encourage others to speak up, so that everyone can be heard. Communicate openly and honestly, give direct, constructive and respectful feedback – good or bad – and inspire people with empathy and compassion to reflect on and improve themselves.
  
  Talking behind another's back, mobbing, politics or egomaniacs have no place in a human centric business and have no place in our company!
  
  Fifth,
  
  Be human, be authentic. Be yourself, be an optimistic and likeable person that people like to work, talk and laugh with. People like to work with people they like and respect. Customers make purchases from people they like.
  
  Having fun and good humor are not in contradiction with being professional.
  
  And finally,
  
  Believe in the power of people!
  
  We are working in a very technology driven and complex environment, let us make a difference by putting people in the center of everything we do and inspire them to leverage technology for a better work life.
• 8. Be proud of what you do
  We have the privilege to work in a safe environment and have a good reputation.
  
  For our customers, we are usually not just a supplier, but above all a trusted and important partner. They trust us to do our best for their company and their users. Because we provide the technology and the tools that they use to manage their most critical business processes. We create and maintain the nervous system and blood circulation of their business. What we do is business critical in most cases, and our performance has a direct impact on the success of our customers. We provide the most valuable technologies and tools they use.
  
  Think about the responsibility you have and how much trust has been placed in you.
  
  You make a difference because you change and enrich other people’s world every day.
  
  Be proud of what you do and be humble and thankful for the trust and respect people give to you. We are very proud to work with you!
• 9. Inspire others
  The mission of our partner Microsoft is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”. Microsoft products are designed to empower people, partners and customers.
  
  COSMO CONSULT solutions are designed to inspire people to make companies more successful. We strongly believe that inspired people create better, more sustainable results and business impact and increase the success of companies. We take advantage of our products and the products of our partners to empower people and companies, but it is our mission to inspire them with the solutions we create.
  
  At COSMO, great people use great technology to build solutions tailored exactly to our customers’ desires and needs. Our solutions and services are created to support our customers’ business and our users’ daily work in the best way possible and make their life better, easier, more convenient and more successful. But to really inspire people, our products, solutions and services have to do more than just meet their requirements. They have to excite them contemplate new ideas, new opportunities and to look for new ways of improving their business processes and lives.
  
  As a trusted business partner, we have to create solutions that our customers not just use somehow, but really embrace and love. If we achieve this goal, we will fulfil our mission and make our customers winners of digitalization.
  
  Great teams with passionate people and the ambition to do excellent work by putting people in the center will inspire others and make a difference for the better.
  
  We inspire people to make companies more successful!
• 10. Take responsibility, build trust
  There is a vast difference between being given responsibility and taking responsibility.
  
  You can entrust someone with responsibility for something but if this person is does not accept this responsibility, you will have nothing. Taking responsibility is not a question of hierarchies, but a question of attitude and character. It is about taking ownership and to really feel responsible for tasks, people or companies.
  
  Everyone at our company has to take responsibility – responsibility for the team, for our customers, our company, our vision, our purpose and for every person we work with. The best things always arise from passion and true sense of responsibility.
  
  Taking responsibility also means to be mindful with yourself, your private life, your family and friends, your health, interests and hobbies. As already mentioned, taking responsibility is an attitude and nothing that can be given to you. The question is‚ do you feel responsible? Taking responsibility is the precondition for trust and freedom. People who feel truly responsible stand by their commitments. We inspire trust and freedom by taking responsibility.
  
  If people see and feel that you take responsibility, you will not only gain more autonomy and freedom but also build trust in relationships with colleagues, partners and customers. Because people will believe in you and your ability to make things happen even when they get difficult. People who take responsibility are people we and our customers can count on, because they do everything possible to keep their commitments.
  
  Taking responsibility and building trust are the basic requirements of our business.