Please introduce yourself:

My name is Paul Kwiatkowskyj. Well, not sure if I can keep this short but will try. After studying Marketing in GB in the late sixties I left to come to Germany. No need to go into the reasons here but after a few years, I felt the need to get back into a marketing-orientated role. In April of 1973 I started at Verlag Chemie as an Export Promotion Assistant. What is that you may ask: Well to put it simply I wrote descriptive promotional texts for the 10-15 English language books that we published at the time. I was then responsible for ensuring that these promotional catalogues were then distributed to our “world-wide” network of Agents. Perhaps also worthy of note, I was the first “native English Employee” at the time. Over the course of the next 38 years, I moved between Marketing and Sales and ended up as Sales Director of Wiley-VCH. 

What is/was your relationship with Wiley-VCH? As mentioned above I spent almost all of my working life at Wiley-VCH, VCH Publishing, and Verlag Chemie. I retired a couple of years ago but still have very close ties to the company. My wife is still active within Marketing and I am in regular contact with my old team as well as colleagues throughout the world who made my career such an exciting and successful one.

Why did you choose to work in academic publishing? There was no real reason for moving to academic publishing initially, I was thankful to be able to get a good job with a distinct lack of the German language (some say that this still exists, ha, ha). However, after a very short period of time I started to really love what I was doing, being able to travel the world many times, meeting some very clever and distinguished people as well as a fantastic group of colleagues in almost every country in the world. Academic Publishing is universal, global with no boundaries whatsoever.

What was your most remarkable situation or exciting experience during this time? (For long-time employees, in addition: How has working at Wiley-VCH changed over time?) Okay. I will have a problem here as every single year of my time at Wiley-VCH I experienced remarkable situations and exciting moments. It will be impossible to select any single experience. So, I will list a few of them in no specific order but please be aware that I could go on for hours:       

• Travel to almost every country in the world, from Australia to China, throughout Europe and North America, many times. Many years in a row I spent 6 weeks in a row in Asia.
• The more than 100 Sales Conferences that I attended in many of these countries
• The transition from Telex to Fax and then finally e-Mail. I remember writing handwritten reports on customer visits in hotels throughout the world and then faxing them through (no mobiles/laptops etc then)
• Organising and opening the VCH offices in Japan as well as in Deerfield Beach, Fl.
• Organising and hosting numerous Wiley-VCH Annual Betriebsfeiern.
• Managing the constant channel conflicts between books and journals, trade and online, direct and intermediaries.
• The changes in ownership from the German Chemical Society, through venture capitalists to John Wiley, all on there own brought specific challenges that needed to be overcome.

The one thing however that stays foremost in my mind, despite all of the changes and reorganisations. The one constant that was always present: The people, the friends, colleagues, team members. A better group of people does not exist anywhere else in the world.

What are you most looking forward to in this anniversary year? Too be honest I assume that this question is redundant as there will not really be any celebrations that will take place due to the Corona pandemic. This is really sad as it does not happen often that a company such as Wiley-VCH is able to celebrate such a long history and as publishers, communication is paramount in all that we do. Not being able to do this in a personal, physical way is tragic. However, in the online world of today I am certain that many of our creative colleagues will come up with ways and means of making the anniversary a thing to remember.

Please complete this sentence: 100 Years of Growing Knowledge is….a feat that not many companies have been able to manage and being part of this for so long made me proud to play my small part in helping grow this knowledge internationally.