CEO Roland Busch’s remarks at gala event in Berlin
engineering.com was one of over 50 international media and influencers invited to Berlin to celebrate Siemens AG’s 175th birthday party.
At a gala dinner, CEO Roland Busch paid tribute to the company’s founder, Werner von Siemens, and thanked all Siemens employees, currently numbering 300 thousand, as well as past employees, about 4 million.
Siemens and Germany have been intertwined throughout the company’s history. To acknowledge Siemens role in Germany’s past and present was Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
Below is the full text of Bosch’s speech.
175 years – almost a dozen generations. A lot can change in that time. But some things remain the same. Chancellor Scholz spoke of the power to work magic and the power to act. Nathalie von Siemens mentioned the Siemens spirit and our corporate culture.
Where do our roots go back to? To the Siemens brothers and Johann Georg Halske.
We delved into the archives and read some of their letters, including some between Werner von Siemens and his brother Carl. I was astonished. The same things that concern us today were already on the mind of our founder back in the 19th century.
Today, at Siemens, we have four strategic priorities: customer impact, empowerment, technology with purpose and a growth mindset.
That may sound a bit like the latest management jargon. But in Werner’s letters, we discovered he felt the very same aspiration that prompted those four priorities.
“Our customers would have stopped importuning us with orders long ago if we had not insisted strictly on releasing only well-tested equipment for delivery,” wrote Werner von Siemens to his brother Carl on April 1, 1871.
Ensuring the highest level of quality. Back then and now. But demands today are even higher. Our customers and partners want more than just something that runs smoothly. They want to know and feel how we make their business stronger.
For my 300,000 colleagues and myself, that means we need to ask the right questions, listen closely and see the world through our customers’ eyes.
And we need to take the initiative ourselves. Werner von Siemens saw things the same way:
“It had become clear to me very early that a satisfactory development of the continually growing firm must depend on securing the happy, spontaneous cooperation of all the workers for the furtherance of its interests,” wrote Werner von Siemens in his 2004 Recollections.
Yes, exactly. Happiness. Cooperation. And more and more important: spontaneity. Which means trying things out; making things; making mistakes; asking less often for permission. And it works! We’ve become more daring at Siemens, and more entrepreneurial. Because we have to be, because digitalization is constantly picking up pace.
“A technical invention only achieves value and importance if industrial art itself has so far progressed that the invention is a practical one and supplies a need.” This from Werner’s 1966 Recollections.
Here, Werner von Siemens describes the difference between invention and innovation. The difference between having an idea and successfully placing it on the market and with customers.
The books on the history of technology say he discovered the electro-dynamic principle. That’s true, but the Englishman Charles Wheatstone published findings on the same topic at almost the same time.
Werner von Siemens and his team then rigorously took the decisive next step: they took the customer benefits of the electro-dynamic principle and turned them into marketable products and – better than many others – brought them to market and industrialized them. The foundation for our success!
“I have certainly also striven for profit and wealth, but most importantly not to enjoy them, but to earn the means to carry out other plans and enterprises,” said Werner.
Even back then, Werner von Siemens already had a very good understanding of the importance of growth for a company. Yet revenue growth isn’t the only kind of growth we need. Our people, too, must continue to grow as individuals.
More than ever, they must – throughout their lives – remain inquisitive and learn new things, persistently work on their ideas and grow from the inevitable setbacks.
We have a great task ahead of us – to reinvent Siemens together. Just as the generations before us have done.
And that is the great constant in our history!
Thank you for being with us. Today, and in the future.
