you get to know another
field and other people
Alfred Henry Heineken received many honours
during the course of his life:
WoBo
Chevalier of the Order of the Dutch Lion (1983)
Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France, 1983)
Flonorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Rochester
(U.S.A., 1989)
Commander of the Order of Orange Nassau (1989)
Honorary Master of Business Administration from INSEAD
(France, 1989)
Silver Medal from the Burgomaster and Aldermen of
Amsterdam (1989)
Silver Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences (1990)
Officier de la LÈgion d'Honneur (France, 1991)
Honorary Doctorate of'Humane Letters' from the Hofstra
University in New York (1996)
instance: Poland would be divided into five states, France into
seven and Germany into eleven. Alfred Heineken considered how
to make the states governable ("My assertion is that nobody can
govern an area with a population approaching half a billion
people by adopting a centralist approach"), taking into account
population groups with a history of occupying particular lands.
Alfred Heineken was the first to put his ideas into perspective.
"I freely admit that I don't have the answer to the practical
problems associated with this plan. It's not a blueprint for how to
build such a Europe. I'm not smart enough for that. I'm a seeder,
not a breeder. I just sow ideas. It's not my job to put them into
practice. In publishing my brochure, all I want is for 15,000
people to consider the idea rather than just ten."
Alfred Heineken lived life to the full. He enjoyed the fine things in
life and would have loved to have got much more out of life.
"I would have liked to have had five bodies with which to do five
different things at once. I would love to be an architect and
adman and an industrialist and a composer." His qualities of
leadership and his ambitions were also reflected in his hobbies.
"Most of all I would like to be a conductor, with a large orchestra
of 160 people all playing according to my directions..."
Alfred Heineken gave his creativity free rein when it came to
solving a problem, resulting in his 'inventing things' as he himself
liked to say. A typical example of his creativity was the WoBo -
short for World Bottle. He was looking for a way of recycling the
green export bottles, which otherwise ended up being dumped.
Alfred Heineken came up with an original idea: why not use the
bottles to build houses? He concluded that a square bottle, with a
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