Stuttgart Stefan Hartung does not appear in public in his first week as Bosch boss – but he is sending the first written signals. The “Bosch Zünder”, the employee newspaper that has been published since 1919, dedicates the presentation to the generation change at the top of the foundation group with a drawing of a smiling new boss in the center of the picture. The 55-year-old engineer is flown in as high as possible among the 400,000 employees. “Change with foresight”, it says in the headline.
The bar is really set high. With a record investment of 60 billion euros in research and development, his predecessor Volkmar Denner wrote a change for the future in his era, which Hartung should now redeem as quickly as possible.
Bosch’s slogan “Technology for life” continues to apply. But while Denner’s impetus was to push the boundaries of what is technically feasible, under Hartung Bosch has to offer more “technology for customers” than before – in other words, meet their needs more quickly. That is why the industrial group wants to offer significantly more services than before in the digital age.
This requires a boss who is more focused on people than the more scientifically oriented predecessor could have been. That is why Bosch Communication is striving to bring out these Hartung characteristics. “I always gain a lot of energy through the exchange with people. It’s almost like a battery, ”quotes the“ Bosch Zünder ”Hartung.
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Born in Dortmund, he is bursting with energy and brings a lot with him: He studied and earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen University within ten years. This was followed by seven years as a consultant at McKinsey.
He started at Bosch in 2004 with home appliances. He can talk so enthusiastically about technical devices that afterwards one considers a dishwasher to be a kind of wonder of the world. This was followed by positions in power tools, energy and building technology and, most recently, in the core division of mobility.
Hartung is enthusiastic about technology
Anyone who meets Hartung for the first time inevitably thinks that the technology fan speaks faster than he thinks. Until you realize after a while: He thinks even faster than he speaks. The first meeting with the rather stoic new Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz threatens to become a discovery of slowness for someone like Hartung.
But the child of the Ruhr area can get along with people, as it is called in many places in the group. And if he only gets a quarter of an hour from the Chancellor, he will include as many important points in it as other CEOs do not even manage to do in an hour. In the past, the Bosch bosses always had a very good connection with the Federal Chancellery. In any case, Hartung also became boss because he was able to keep up intellectually and strategically with his predecessor Denner.
The mechanical engineer who holds a doctorate has been part of the management team since 2013. There he initially had the thankless job of handling the solar division with 3,000 employees. Hartung knows what makes the company tick, because he has managed central areas himself for years – most recently as head of the auto division. Chip crisis, delivery bottlenecks, Corona, job cuts in the transformation to electromobility: These are serious problems that will not get any smaller this year.
“He prefers to work with people than with paper,” the employee magazine quotes a companion. But a certain database should not be missing. Bosch is now presenting the Tech-Compass 2022 at the CES trade fair in Las Vegas from Wednesday. This is a survey of 8,000 people in the five countries of Germany, Great Britain, the USA, India and China. The survey is intended to provide insight into diverse opinions and perspectives on a wide variety of technology-related topics.
>> Read also: Franz Fehrenbach was responsible for Bosch for over 30 years. How did he manage to make the world’s largest automotive supplier more global, faster and greener? An essay.
Hartung asks himself in the preface: “What hopes and worries do people have with regard to technological development? And how do these perspectives differ from country to country? ”83 percent believe that technological progress should be more focused on solving societal problems, 76 percent that technology will play a key role in combating climate change. “People want technology to solve the great challenges of our time and make everyday life easier in many areas,” says Hartung.
“Beam me up, Scotty”: A third of Germans would like to beam
However, the survey also reveals differences that are sure to make the new Bosch CEO smile: “Beam me up, Scotty”: More than a third of Germans are hoping to beam. The hypothetical transmission of an object in the form of radiation, on the other hand, plays only a subordinate role in the technology fantasies of Americans. And that although the US TV series Star Trek (“Raumschiff Enterprise”) only brought beaming into German living rooms in the 1970s.
However, if it were technically possible, only 26 percent of the Germans surveyed would leave the earth forever to live on another planet. In contrast, 46 percent of the Chinese would like to give up their terrestrial habitat.
Which would then be extrapolated to over half a billion Chinese: a declaration of war on every galaxy. But since all Chinese will probably remain on earth for the entire term of Hartung’s term of office, the greatest task for the new Bosch boss will be to derive opportunities for Bosch from this fact.
This shouldn’t be a problem for the die-hard optimist who likes to end his sentences with a smile. 63 percent of the Chinese want machines to be able to read their minds. Bosch is working on this topic with quantum sensors.
And if Hartung also solves the problem with beaming, not much can go wrong for the 135-year-old Bosch Group.
More: The outgoing Bosch boss Volkmar Denner “We will significantly exceed our forecasts”