Personal information about Markus Eckhart

Professional background and career

Markus Eckhart in short

20 years of corporate experience
16 years of leadership and line manager responsibility
Member in various international management teams
Focus on:
- Decision making, processes & performance management
- Controlling and Finance
- Strategic marketing
Leader of complex corporate projects
Creator of structures and processes
Responsibility over extensive corporate decisions
Professionalism & quality

International corporations, leadership and focus on decisions

Mind your business builds on my extensive experience in international corporations.

I worked for Borealis for more than 13 years, the majority of which I spent in the head office in Vienna. Before my final role - Head of Strategic Marketing & Services - I was responsible for central processes and projects in the areas of Group Controlling and Business Finance. In these tasks, I worked closely with the Executive Board, Leadership Boards and various functions. A short excerpt of essential topics:

Management of the KPI Excellence project with focus on group controlling and key figures
Core team member Business Optimisation in the Polyolefins division to increase operational results
Core team member Strategy 2025 in the Polyolefins division
Head of the projects Nimblicity in Planning I+II, Holistic Portfolio Management and Reporting Simplification
Responsibility for Marketing Excellence as well as Marketing Representative in the Commercial Excellence Programme

The focus of these tasks was to create sustainable and future-oriented structures. Particular focus was placed on bringing decisions and their implementation to the forefront, as well as designing processes and responsibilities around them.

Borealis developed from a difficult phase after the financial crisis in 2008 into one of the most successful companies in Austria. Experiencing and helping to shape this phase of transformation was undoubtedly a formative experience for me and laid the foundation for the thematic focus of Mind your business.

Prior to my time at Borealis, positions at Mondi as Group Controller Corrugated and at Alstom in Austria and Switzerland provided me with further valuable experience. At that time, I learned to appreciate aspects such as internationality, working with a wide variety of cultures and functions, and thinking in terms of possibilities.

Mind your business brings together my diverse, practical experiences and focuses on the topics in which I have developed extensive competencies. What distinguishes me is the focus on interfaces and the connection of different perspectives - in my experience, silo thinking rarely leads to truly excellent results. Rather, it requires the ability to both take a step back and go into detail whenever necessary - I have proven these qualities many times over.

Keynote "De-Biasing Leadership", Fifteen Seconds 2021

Photo: Fifteen Seconds | Tim Koenig

Human factors

Analysis, methods, processes - these are important foundations for the professional orientation of Mind your business.

The real motive behind the company is to support people when they need it.

Mind your business is not a purely technical consultancy. In my professional career, it was important to me to also support on a human level. As a manager and member of leadership teams, I had a responsibility - for my teams, but also beyond. As part of this responsibility, I also understood how to support others in their personal development.

Sparring, mentoring and coaching have long been part of my offering - Mind your business now allows me to expand this further.

Cooperation at eye level is one of my core values.

Becoming clearer, mastering difficult decisions or implementing them more effectively are topics that regularly move people. It is my motivation to make a positive contribution.

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What others are saying:

What makes Mind your business stand out

Depth instead of headlines
Proven practice instead of fine-sounding theory
Individual instead of "more of the same"
Real solutions instead of sham successes
International experience instead of a narrow template

Why de-biasing?

De-biasing workshop 2021
Photo credits: Fifteen Seconds | Christine Qiu

My interest in de-biasing

I am often asked how I came to be interested in unconscious biases.

My starting point was a practical issue - in an analysis in my corporate role at the time, I noticed that there were clear patterns in some bad decisions. We were regularly making the same mistake but didn't know why.

I couldn't find an explanation in our processes or tools. I then delved into the question of what systematically leads us - seemingly always rational - people astray. I discovered the world of unconscious biases.

Unfortunately, there was no suitable offer to translate the theory of these well-researched phenomena usefully into the world of our company. We were primarily concerned with achieving concrete goals, not so much with psychological theory. Therefore, I started this "translation work" myself and acquired skills step by step. I learned that biases in companies represent a big risk in many ways. I tested the effectiveness of countermeasures and learned a lot about the practical transfer for improved decisions.

This initial spark was more than 10 years ago.

Mind your business and de-biasing

It is important for me to share the knowledge I have built up over the years about biases in the business context. I am particularly interested in what we can effectively do against the negative effects of our unconscious biases - this is what we call de-biasing.

De-biasing flows into the Mind your business offer in various ways:

structurally: The offerings Decisively Better and Controlling & Finance give companies concrete approaches for de-biasing processes or decision meetings.
individually: entrenched patterns sometimes get in the way of personal change - elements of de-biasing are also available on request in business coaching, business sparring and mentoring.

You can find out more about unconscious biases, the innovative de-biasing concept and more background information in the de-biasing section.

De-Biasing works!

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