This is the masterpiece of management. How can you be a leader in a market at the same time, disrupt yourself. And innovation, by the way, it's invention. Diverse teams deliver better results than those which are very homogeneous. Yeah. And this, I think it's a, it's a magic
Welcome to This is Working, where leaders share their strategies for success and the lessons that shaped them. From his start as a physicist to leading one of the world's most successful tech companies, Siemens President and CEO Roland Bush knows all about what it takes to move your career forward. I sat down with Roland at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he shared his secret to knowing when it's the right time to make a job change, as well as his tips for leading a successful global team.
I'm a physicist by education. I started indeed my career at Siemens in research department. I moved very quickly on and did the automotive business. I went to Shanghai for a couple of years, and then I took over the head of the strategy department of Siemens. And from that was the next step was managing board member. Then after being CTO, COO, stepped up into the CEO function four years ago.
So in every one of those steps, are you the kind of guy who just says yes to all of these opportunities? We had Joaquin Duato, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson who said, he's never said no when someone's come to him and said, we need you for this role. What's been your reaction to that? So,
I mean, every step was one, which I said, yes, I do that. I'm in it. Yeah, I'm all in it. And I don't wonder what's happening afterwards, but that's what I do. None of them was really planned. So it came in, I had a plan, but then came a surprise. And in most cases it was turnaround business. Yeah. So I, I didn't have the pleasure to, to run a business which is doing well, except in my last function, which is now.
But you like doing these kind of turnarounds, it sounds like
I mean, you learning curve, if you do a turnaround is so steep. I mean, you work hard, extra hard. Obviously, you, you really have to go deep. I believe this is so important because something goes wrong. Obviously your organizations did something wrong, so you have to understand better. So you have to go deep. Don't forget to come back because you cannot micromanage all the time. But the beauty about a turnaround is, is you're pushing uphill. You're losing good people. But there's a certain point, a tipping point when people say, oh, this is something going on. It's getting better. Then you get people back,
This is the point where you have fun and then, and then you see the, the success. But it's hard work.
How do you foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning?
If you don't spend money on R&D, you cannot innovate. So we are, compared to our peers, we are spending in absolute in relative terms, more.
And innovation, by the way, it's don't mess it up, is invention. An invention gets an innovation when it hits the market successfully. So therefore, you really have to make sure that, that they don't, people mess it up and they say they have a great product, but it doesn't sell.
So you really have to go all the way through. And that's something what, what we can encourage people also to go with there if they're in research and they go along with their technology into a product and they move on. And this is, this is such a, that's a great experience if you see people growing with their product
On the topic of innovation, innovation, how do you maintain a balance between bold thinking and practical execution when leading such a massive global workforce? So, you know, you're looking around, you see really cool things, you want to do these, but you also have this massive business that has to keep doing, delivering. Exactly. How do you think about it?
This very good question, by the way, because this is the masterpiece of management. How can you be a lead in a market at the same time disrupt yourself? And there's so many examples which failed. I mean, take Xerox, Kodak, or even Siemens. We have our own, own failure. We have, we have communication networks, and we badly failed because we didn't ride the wave. If you think this disruption is all about having the best product, that's only half of the story. The other half is, does your Salesforce sell it? Because Kodak, I mean, these guys were geared for selling these film rolls because they made a hell of a money out of it. Why would you ever sell a digital camera? Right? Right. It wasn't like they missed the digital camera, they couldn't get to market. The best one. Kodak had the best digital camera, but their, their sales force were just saying, I mean, they just actually, they should have set up completely different sales organization and let it go. So therefore have, have that in mind that it's, it's not only technology, it's also the way, how you go to your market.
And then, and then you have to have to make sure that you have certain people who are, who are running on this, on this incremental innovation, as I say, running your business and making it better every time, which creates the money. And then you have to create an environment which allows others on the side to grow fast. Very often you have another mistake. The running business is a big business. You deploy your best people. If you want to build a new product, you need an A team. You need to encourage an A team, put incentives behind and let them go and put them a little bit aside of the organization and let them do the trick.
Is that hard though, as a CEO to say like, oh, these are my best people. I'm now going to pluck from this. And put you over here. It's hard. It's hard.
Your line manager would never let go. Right. If you, if you let them say, they say, oh, well I have a good, I have a good person here.
