The power of ordinary things
Es sind die gewöhnlichen Dinge, die das Leben gewöhnlicher Menschen ausmachen. Was dabei als „gewöhnlich“gilt, richtet sich nach dem jeweiligen Entwicklungsstand der Welt. Wenn Unternehmen gewöhnlichen Menschen ein gewöhnliches Arbeitsleben ermöglichen, i
Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary,” wrote the English author G. K. Chesterton. The work people do, argued Chesterton, brings them together and this is, as he saw it, the first principle of democracy. His definition of democracy could be expressed like this: letting ordinary people get on with their working lives.
When G. K. Chesterton was thinking and writing about these things, just over a century ago, the company that Werner von Siemens had founded was already 60 years old and had some 50,000 workers. Today, Siemens employs more than 377,000 people and it’s now Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate.
CEO Joe Kaeser knows, however, that success is never guaranteed. His rivals, including Switzerland’s ABB, have come under pressure recently from shareholders to sell off weaker businesses, and Siemens will certainly want to avoid the fate of General Electric. The US giant has begun a major restructuring and is being forced to sell a range of assets after getting kicked off the Dow Jones Industrial Average in June.
Kaeser’s answer is Vision 2020+. He presented Siemens’s blueprint for change at the beginning of August and said the goal is to make the company more agile and profitable in the digital industrial age. The turbines-to-trains group intends to reduce the number of operating divisions from five to three as it focuses on factory software and energy markets.
Is Vision 2020+ too short-sighted for today’s fast-moving world? The year 2020
“Digitization will have a dramatic impact on jobs, and that tendency will accelerate”
is not very far away, after all, but as Alan Turing, the great computer scientist and cryptanalyst, once said: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
One thing that needs to be done, Kaeser believes, is to discuss headcount. Initial reports mentioned 6,900 positions being cut, but then Manager magazine put the number at 20,000. Siemens quickly denied this, saying that details of the new strategy are still being worked out.
In mid-september, CNBC’S Nancy Hungerford interviewed Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of the Siemens supervisory board, and she asked him whether big job cuts were coming. “It is very clear to me that digitization will have a dramatic impact on jobs. There is no doubt about that, and that tendency will accelerate,” said Snabe.
“However,” he added, “I have been in [the] IT industry for 25 years of my career and I have seen when innovation happens, new job categories appear. Only ten years ago, we would not have [had] some of the social media jobs that we have today. We cannot, in my opinion, protect the old jobs that are getting automated, but we can develop people, and that is one of the commitments we have at Siemens, to develop people with the skills that are relevant for future jobs.”
The difficult task for Siemens now is to make sure that a corporate career remains as attractive to young people as a job at a start-up, where workers have lots of individual freedom. If it can do this, it will have achieved something extraordinary. Future jobs at Siemens will be like past jobs at Siemens because of their ability to help ordinary people live ordinary lives, which is essential for prosperity and democracy, and as a defence against xenophobia.
“Helping ordinary people live ordinary lives is essential for prosperity and democracy”