Master this skill to build fast, future-ready teams: Siemens CEO Roland Busch

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. Today we talk to Roland Busch, the CEO of technology company Siemens. He'll tell us about how digital transformation is reshaping everything, from industry to how we define a tech job, and what we need to do to keep pace.

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I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum and this is Meet the Leader.

Roland Busch, Siemens CEO: So this is the world we are heading for. It's a transformation, we are in the midst.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: The world is facing several shifts simultaneously. The digital transformation is shortening the cycle of change and almost invisibly making big sectors like health care and manufacturing run more sustainably and efficiently.

It's also making it harder for workers to keep pace and big systemic shifts, especially as an ageing population reshapes the workforce and even shrinks in some countries around the world.

As these changes come, we'll need to be proactive, not reactive. Dr Roland Busch knows this well. He is the CEO of Siemens, a tech company focussed on combining the real and the digital – sectors like health care and transit and industry – using technology to help with things like shortening cycle times, or making companies that much more resilient.

He knows that new innovations like low-code software will help bridge the tech gaps we could see, making it possible for nearly anyone to do things like make an app or train a robot, making some roles more accessible than ever.

I caught up with Roland earlier this year and he shared some innovative retraining initiatives that Siemens has developed and what makes those initiatives so effective.

He also shared a little bit about his background, including what he's learned in his three decades at the company. And how his PhD in physics helps him see change holistically. He'll tell us all about this, but first he'll get us started with how new technologies like the Internet of Things are shaping industry and driving a new type of tech job.

Articles by Roland Busch:

Roland Busch, Siemens: What we are about to see now is connecting devices called IoT [internet of things]. And this is, I think, even bigger because we are really creating impact on the real world. So maintaining the growth of economies while using less resources – not only energy, but any kind of resources.

But that means that all what we do has to have finally end up on the shop floor, at the hardware, which we produce, the way we use the hardware, how we build it in a more efficient way, and how we are finally reducing our energy footprint to zero in order to make our world survive.

So therefore, the point about the new jobs which are creating is also in the transformation, too. Because whatever you did before is changing in a way that shopfloor workers, blue collar workers, for example, when they were working manually in the past, in the future, they eventually programme robots. You use very low-code software, simple-to-use software so that people who are not trained software developers can use technology and programme robots, for example.

So this is the world we are heading for. It's a transformation, we are in the midst. It's a transformation which is also taking into account that we are living in ageing societies, so we have less and less labour. So we need this kind of productivity also on the shop floor. Therefore there's exciting things going on at the shop floor, at the end of the day.

We combine the real and the digital worlds. Sounds simple, but this is something where we really can drive productivity for our customers, we can shorten cycle times, we can improve their operations in the design phase for products, for a plant, if you design it in the operation phase – manufacturing phase, but also in the operation phase, once products are are at work. And we demonstrated also what the industrial metaverse looks like, which is the ultimate target to go for, in order to really take all the benefits out of it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And let's talk a little bit about that labour scarcity, because there are so many structural issues that are going to be making that for the long term. That's going to be the reality. Tell me a little bit more about how these changes in industry and tech are going to sort of help ease, or help tackle, that job scarcity issue.

Roland Busch: I mean, there are a couple of economies or countries which are not suffering from less labour; they are still growing. But the majority of mature markets like in the United States, Europe, Germany in particular, but also Japan, Korea, they are all living in an ageing society. So they are basically they're fighting for immigration as well in order to maintain a certain level of labour. And even China's labour market peaked already. Population also peaked, but labour market peaked a couple of years ago. This is fact.

What's happening now is that we want to use the people in a much, much more productive way, meaning to use the skills of a human being where where we are differentiating and to let the robots, or the machines, or the autonomy, happen where you value, you can replace it.

Let me give you one example, in order to make that transparent for you from the health care market. We have I don't know how it is in the United States, but in Germany, we are missing really nurses in the hospitals. There are less and less people who want to do the job; it's not so well-paid. So the point would be, how can I use their time really to work with patients, rather than running around and looking for the ultrasound machine, the ultrasound device, where do I get stuff? This has to be like on a shop floor. It has to be there, just delivered to you, to the place where you work. If you think that through, through any kind of manufacturing that you have, this is the idea of what we do. It requires a level of complete different design of your plant, even eventually also of your products from the very beginning, so that you can assemble them in a different way. It requires a different change in the set-up of your plans and the operations, but also later on in the operations phase, when you work with stuff, so that you have less people.

For example, driving autonomously. Bus drivers. We are missing bus drivers and technology can help you. I'm talking about autonomous running cars, autonomous running trains or buses. Another one is, again, workflow in hospitals, so they do really focus on on the patients. Another one would be definitively in manufacturing, so that you ultimately can produces a lot, but in a dock manufacturing site, meaning you have to switch the lights off because there's only robots running in and the people they sit on back on the screen and operate a manufacturing site. This is what we can do today in deploying the technology, which we have. And that helps definitively also in the aspect of increasing resilience, meaning bringing manufacturing back to high cost places, and high labour cost places, too.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Every company is going to need to be reskilling. Tell us within Siemens, what Siemens is doing? You guys have a number of programs, including the digitalization academy, among others. Can you tell us a little bit about what Siemens is doing to reskill even within its own workforce?

Roland Busch: Number one is we are very famous for vocational training. We have classroom training and we combine it with training on the job. And we do that since I think more than 100 years. But this is pivoted now for training for our people in terms of the new jobs. They do, as I said, programming, they work with digital technologies, which you bring to the shop floor, they work with robots – so mechatronics, kind of electronics, jobs. So this is one dimension.

There's another one where we looked for what is the work today, what is it tomorrow, for a blue collar worker? And we developed a curriculum to retrain and reskill and upskill the person coming from an existing job to a job to be. And this is not the training which you send them in a classroom for a week, and that's over. This is months and months and months. So it's really a lot of effort we put into it.

Here comes a point which is very interesting. This is a business case, too. Because rather than paying a package for the person to send them at home, trying to find a person on the market, which is hard to find, and once you find him to hire that person and train them again on, maybe on a higher skill level, but still that need the training, that might take six months, maybe a year. And if I can really retrain and reskill people, this is a much cheaper way, and a better and a social, better way to really bring people there.

But you are working also – and now I am jumping to the management level here – here we have training in terms of, let's say, bringing more digitalization to to our markets. This means also working in ecosystems – because digitalization and building IoT solutions, so you need a full technology stack, that requires really pulling a lot of technology together, which Siemens doesn't have. Even if you're such a great big company with 6 billion of R&D, we still need a lot of technology. So working in ecosystems is a completely different way. The former way of working was tier 2, adds value, delivers to tier 1, adds value, delivers to the OEM, and this finally sends a product out to the customers. Tomorrow, it's a network. It's a network of companies working together, working on a... it's a platform-based economy system, you have a certain core platform, which at the heart will be digitalization platform. And then you're adding so many players.

The mindset in working on ecosystems, so that you say you don't share a pie in more pieces, but you make a bigger pie together because the more people are working on the platform, the more potential you have. This change in mindsets requires change in management skills. So we have a management training dedicated for our people who use to develop products and sell them into our ecosystem-based kind of economy. That's a very interesting training. We ask our managers to really build a platform and to see how the benefit comes, if you're adding more people and more players to it. So we are training on all levels. That's what I'm saying here. It's the shop floor, it's also our engineers, up to the management.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And in asking management to help develop these platforms, what does that sort of training or sets of guidelines look like? What do you ask them to do? Or what are they sort of required to do, so that they're prepared to do that?

Roland Busch: We invite them for a training – this training, by the way, was developed together with a professor from MIT who is really working on this platform economy. What we ask them to do is, go back to to their work and think about how do they have to change their business model, in order to really start this flywheel of platform-based economy. Which are the partners you need to integrate? How do you integrate them? How do I make my system open? For example, develop open APIs in order to have other partners to bring their technology into it and to have interfaces. That goes all the way to the engineering department, goes to their product design, but also to their partnership management. So we ask them to really think about what are the partners you need, and how can you ensure that they are getting their benefits, which is another dimension.

So you have to, at any point in time, understand why is a partner our partner and what is the benefit this partners is taking in working on our platform. And we ask them to translate what they learned into their daily life; also educate and train their the environment and take it from there.

If you ask me what is my biggest challenge, it's maybe not the developing the right products. I think we have great guys to along this technology stack – from a sensor over the edge device to the cloud to the application – I think we got that pretty right. But the transformation of how to run a business and to to change the mindset, that's maybe the biggest challenge, I guess.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And with this, what is the change that you could see, maybe even in five years, as you kind of have sort of more people with this mindset, more people working on this, aligned on this, what would be different?

Roland Busch: One thing which is different for sure, is that everything about sustainability, using less resources, eventually also scarcity of water, biodiversity, will get much, much more attention going forward – on a management level, but all the way down to supply chain management and the like. So that's just about to start because the pressure is up. We know that we are behind achieving our COP21 targets to reach our 1.5%. We need to really accelerate. So that will come much, much more into our focus. So our people have to to learn and to understand better what our contribution can be, how can we stand where we are and what kind of impact we can generate. This is one thing.

The second one is the requirement on skills regarding digitalization and automation will be much, much higher. The requirement will increase because the penetration will go up very fast. Reasons are obvious. As I said before, it's not only labour scarcity, but it's also when you want to increase your resilience, meaning diversifying. Diversifying means building green manufacturing sites. So you would not incremental invest, you would put a new one, a green one, a greenfield one. And when you do that, you obviously go for a full digitalized, fully-automated version. Why would you settle for less if you really have a choice to go for something new? So that means there will be a tremendous increase in the requirements of how to deal with new technologies.

And ultimately, what I also believe is that lifelong learning is the new way of how we have to look at it because -- this is another element in it -- digitalization is shortening cycle times and development times, that means you have to learn much faster. I do believe in a couple of years we are sending people to the university, maybe a little bit shorter, bring them into job, and after a couple of years we take them back to university for maybe another study in order to to get up to the latest technologies and bring them back to the job. And this is what we call a growth mindset. In our company, we encourage our people to live this growth mindset, meaning be curious, constant learning, learning something new and learning something new also means being allowed to make mistakes. Because, of course, if you do something new, you're not that professional on it. Learn from it and take it from there. And this kind of growth mindset of giving yourself into it, and you can do can reach every level if you really try hard and learn new things, that's something that I believe will determine the future in a couple of years from now.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Siemens is very large company, so all of the people that these efforts impact – both on the reskilling, but for the management as well as all the other folks around – how many people are involved in this reskilling effort?

Roland Busch: Talking about Siemens, we are a company which turned 175 years old last year. In the total history of Siemens, we had 4 million people working for Siemens and currently they are more than 300,000 people working for Siemens on a global basis. Regarding the people on this, we call it NextWork. We started as a pilot in order to understand how we can put these curriculums together, how to make it really specific so they are learning on the spot the right technologies, and now we are scaling it up.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So many companies are putting in reskilling programmes. And some of them are just getting started, they're realizing they need to do itl and maybe some people haven't gotten started yet. They think that they can wait a little bit longer or they're trying to get their ducks in a row. What is the risk of not acting urgently to reskill your workforce?

Roland Busch: I tell you, one risk is that you have a problem to get talents and particular talents which has the certain skills. And the skills are again, digitalization, automation, any kind of new technology. So therefore, I do believe that it's not a question of whether you do it, but how fast you have to do it, because you're running into a problem if you don't work on reskilling and training your people. So therefore my advice is better start early.

What we did is we created a learning platform. I was running around and then finding out who are the best learning platforms. And I ended up somewhere obviously in India and a I.T. company, they're training a 100,000 people a year and they have a platform which is open source. So we used it and put it in place and we put, I don't know, God knows how many training modules we have there. It's a living environment. We also encourage our experts to upload their training content to it, and we are working also on now getting kind of degrees. So that means you you have to get a degree on improving your capabilities before we can move on for another job. Some trainings are voluntarily, but in some cases I think we have to make it mandatory, because we really have to make the people work on ensuring that they are still relevant in the future.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So many people have been saying, 'Hey, we got to think skill first, not jobs first.' What is your take on that? Do you think it's skills first? You are also talking about ecosystems and platforms and how we have to think about this. What is your take on it?

Roland Busch: At the end of the day, we talk about individuals and they have their interests. Some have families and they say they have private lives first and have to balance that all the time. Actually, my philosophy is not work-life balance; I talk about work-life integration. I think it's a much, much better concept so that you don't distinguish between that. And it makes my life at least much better. I do believe that it's a handover, so to speak. Of course you need the skills to do your work, but it's a moving target. The work and the skills required in your work are changing. So it's a constant back and forward.

The only thing what I don't like is when times are getting rough and maybe businesses have a hard time to make their numbers in a particular fiscal year, that the first thing they do is cut on education and training – because it falls back on you in the next year. It's the easiest way because you can immediately save some money, but it's not a smart thing to do. So you can recognize how much emphasis I'm putting on, on really taking care about the increasing of the quality level of the people that were working for us.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We've talked a little bit about skills here. Is there a skill that you personally depend on to do your work?

Roland Busch: I think there are a couple of skills. I mean, number one is having a growth mindset. I'm curious. I'm learning. I'm trying to get as much as possible of new things, in order to learn because I think I need it in order to stay tuned to what's happening in the world, in the fast changing world. In particular, if you're sitting in in the lead of such a big company, you need to guide it in the right direction. So you don't miss a trend on opportunity. That's one thing.

The other one is the soft skills, people skills, it's empathy. It's really taking care for our people. Listening skills are very good. All the time you don't speak, you're listening more and you learn more. And the other skill is I do believe it's communication skills. Because I was talking about the transformation we are in the midst. Transformation means it's a technological transformation – and as I said, I think we will get that right – but it's also a transformation of taking people with me in all dimensions. As I said, new business models, new technologies, new markets, and making clear to the people where we go and why we would go there, and why it's good to go in the direction and to get a buy-in is of essence.

So that's one more skill which which I believe is is very important, at least on management, it's empowerment. And I said, the world is moving much, much faster because digitalization is accelerating everything what we do. You cannot afford, if you have to make a decision to go all the way up the hierarchy, take a decision and go all the way down, try to push the decision level as low as possible.

This is empowerment. But empowerment is not anarchy. It's a clear target. A target we're going to go with a strategy. So you set the frame within that frame. We ask the people to execute and do their job according to their best knowledge and the skills they have. It's a two-way street. Empowerment means that we let go; we give accountability. But that means also, again, we give trust to the people, but it's also about accountability. So that means we really want them to deliver. It's not always all going right. It's all fine as long as we know it early enough and that we have to have a chance to tune it backwards. But it's all fine. And if there are mistakes, then we correct them and we go on and learn from them. And this way, for the people, it's much more fun, much, much faster, and very often if you work on top with diverse teams, you will get better results.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: There is a lot that Siemens is doing with interoperability right now. I want to talk about this. I think it's quite cool. But first, why don't we level set for folks who aren't maybe familiar? Can you define interoperability? For those who aren't familiar, tell us why it's important.

Roland Busch: Let me give you one idea about how this whole thing comes together. Siemens launched a platform, our open digital business platform. We call it Siemens Xcelerator. And now I can explain to you what that is, you recognize how this whole thing comes together on what we talked about so far.

So this platform stands on three legs. One leg is the technology stack. It's not only hardware and software, it's the sensors, it's edge devices, it's the cloud, it's applications. This is one basis and we have to make this technology work. You have also different technologies from different companies, so you have to ensure that they speak the right languages, these technologies.

The second leg is the ecosystem. As I said before, there are so many technologies out there which need to be integrated and to really come to good solutions in the IoT space, that you need a very, very strong ecosystem, including integration partners. If somebody wants to deploy a technology on the shop floor and eventually on 20 different sides in the world, you need partners to help you. You need application developers to help you.

The third leg is definitively, it's clear to understand, it's a marketplace. It's a place where you can inform yourself, you see customer journeys and you can make transactions. So this is the frame of our platform which we are developing.

Now comes to technology, and the technology has to be open. As I said, it has to be interoperable, which is important. Interoperability means the following: that once you deploy a solution, normally it covers, if you work on a certain market, it covers maybe 80% of the functionality required. But the last 20% is something that you always need specific for customers, bespoke.

Interoperability means that you can use this solution, and you bring it to a customer and you parameterized it so that the last 20% or maybe 10% of customization can be done by the customer themselves using local platforms – so it's interoperable depending on wherever you deploy it and customers. Along with that goes auto openness. Openness means that you have open APIs, so people can use the software to programme in it, make it usable in different contexts and expand it. It's open from the perspective that you can add on new technologies. So these are key elements of the technology stack which we're delivering, which has to come together.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Why is interoperability so important? Sort of looking forward to transformation, if we don't have this piece, what happens? So people sort of understand why this is so important?

Roland Busch: It's so important because otherwise you cannot scale. Let's assume we want to build a solution for a chemical customer, making chemicals. There are that big companies, they're out there, they are smaller ones. But process is always you get some chemical stuff, you mix it, you plan it, you have batch processing, and then finally you to develop product, whatever it is. So if you go out there and if I send my people all to a big customer and they say, 'I want to have this kind of process automated.' I'm pretty sure our people would go, 'Oh, they're big, a great job, make it bespoke,' and that's about it. And then comes the next customer and we start all over again.

So what's the idea? The idea is that you say, 'Let's have a look at all of these chemical customers. What do they have in common? What kind of things you see again and again and again?' Try to take these core functional requirements and bring them into our technology stack. Make some modules which you need anyhow, because they make the core process work of any chemical customer. It's a complex process because you need a good overview. What are the real points which you want to build, in terms of taking complexity out and build it in modules? These are standard modules and you can combine them. And then on top, comes this application specific part, which you then make specific for customers.

Once you have that done, you can imagine that scaling and bringing a solution from one customer to other goes 10 times faster because you productize basically your solutions and make it adaptable via parameterization. And that's the basic idea into interoperability. So without interoperability, there will be no scalability of your solutions, and that would limit the speed with which we can increase the market and bring technology to the market.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And at the speed at which you can further tackle things like emissions and all those other big challenges...

Roland Busch: Exactly.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I want to talk about a previous role that you'd held at Siemens as Chief Strategy Officer and one of the big efforts that you drove in that role was to help Siemens become carbon neutral. Give us a little bit of the sense of what was needed to execute that, throughout the organization, whether it was capabilities that needed to be built, more mindset shifting what what was involved, sort of making that big shift happen?

Roland Busch: We were one of the first industrial companies who really announced their carbon neutrality target for 2030. So it started off at the at the top of the company to make our managing board at that time be ready to commit to a target. What should the target be? So how much offset would you allow? How much really gross and net CO2 reduction would you do? So this was the first one. And obviously CEO at that time would ask, tell me where we are and how sure are you that you get there? Because no CEO wants to get a commitment out on the market and finally miss it. So you have to have a certain kind of grip on it.

And so the first thing was to make it transparent where we are, to develop a project, how can we reduce our emissions? We worked on our fleets, but also in our own energy consumption, buying green fuels, but also reducing. But also, and this was maybe the most the most challenging event, running a kind of analysis through all the our plants in particular to see what can we do there in terms of building photovoltaics and the rooftop, going for building automation and actually eating our own own dog food. So that because we have building automation, we have energy efficient drives and whatnot. And how much would it cost? This is the next thing.

So what we did is we, we put a bunch of people together, provided this transparency, made an estimation at that time how much it would cost. What's the payback? If I invest in a kind of a refurbishing on the manufacturing side, putting photovoltaic on the rooftop, what's the payback? So our business case behind... because it should be a business case, too. At the end of the day, we wanted these solutions also to go to the market. And if I can show, 'look, I did it for my own plant', it's much easier to sell it.

And once we did it, we had a certain uncertainty, as you can imagine. We put a number on the table of how much to invest and to bring down to cut our emissions by half by year 2020, which we did, and then go for the other half thereafter. And then we finally released it and we go for it. And so far we will look like a clockwork. Here comes the news. Because at that time we thought that we can reduce it, I think, to a level of 80% or 70% or 80%, and we offset the rest. But now the new regulations say you cannot call yourself carbon neutral if you don't cut it to -90% and offset only 10%. So we recently decided to invest another 600 million to go for that level to really cut it to -90%, compared to 2019. And we are on good track.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I want to talk to you about your career at Siemens. So you have been a CEO just since 2021, but you have been at Siemens for nearly 30 years. Can you tell us a little bit about how you have changed as a leader during that time?

Roland Busch: Hmm. In order to to give you that understanding, that very rough run through my career. I started off in corporate technology, developing great stuff on fuel cells. And then I went to automotive industry. We still had it at that time, it was automotive supply. I ended up running a business for navigation systems. Then I transferred to Asia. I was running the whole Siemens automotive business for Asia and China before I was called back. Then, I stepped up after, an immediate step, into head of strategy and then it was after three years giving responsibility for one of our sectors at the time, which was a third of Siemens business, which was the bad business, so to speak. And so a compilation of all the businesses which really didn't perform well. I turned that around in a couple of years and then I was going over a step of being CTO. I was also Chief Sustainability Officer on top for a short while, also even additionally CHRO. And then I stepped up to the CEO position.

What I learned is, you cannot plan being the CEO. So it's a lot of luck in between, as well, but it helps if you perform, obviously. But what is really key is, and this is something which I believe maybe all of the people who are sitting on a relatively young age in a managing board function, or a CEO function, is that most of them had at a certain point in their career somebody who trusted them in order to make a double step or a triple step. So putting yourself in the position that you normally need another five years, seven years, eight years to mature and to step there, somebody who makes a decision has to know you good enough and has trust in your capabilities to give it that boost. Actually, I got it twice.

And many, many people would confirm what I'm saying. And that's something where I believe you have to be known, you have to have a network and the decision-makers should be aware. And regarding my skills, I think what I always kept along the way is that I can delegate and empower people, so I don't do have to do anything. However, if something is going wrong, I can go as deep as you want down to the bits and bytes of a software, down to the nuts and bolts of a train, in order to really understand what the problem is. Because if something is going wrong, a manager has to get his hand around it and really take care.

Key is -- don't stay there. You have to come back and empower people. Otherwise 24-7 would not be good enough. So and that's something I can do. I think I have a good skills in order to analyse problems and go really deep, which you can do only if you keep on learning. Because going deep into in software or hardware or whatever, it requires a certain amount of knowledge and experience. That's what I do.

Another one is treating people right. I always understood that if you don't get your people behind you in critical projects, you need them to stand up and to go into the work, maybe work harder, maybe give it longer, because we need the people. So to motivate people to come to the office, explain to them why it is good and appreciate, also give appreciation and showing empathy. So this is another element.

Linda Lacina: Was there ever a moment that was kind of a turning point when it comes to delegation? Everybody has to learn delegation. What works for them? What's the style? It's something that's in the normal evolution of anybody. It was there like a turning point for you where you're like, 'Oh gosh, I have to change my habit. I usually would have just done it myself, but I need to engage my team. I need help, I need to reach out to others'? Was there a point at some point where you're like, I need to change how I do this that shaped how you work now is when it turns to delegation?

Roland Busch: When I was first transforming from the technology development into the automotive business, I was at that time also running the strategy for the automotive business globally. I was very deep into it and I had a small team and we were preparing a strategy workshop. And I felt that I have to work on this work because the workshop is whatever 80 managers, all who come together, and my team was in charge to really handle that, and I thought I have to control everything. And then I got a really clear feedback from my team to say, 'Why don't you let us do... we can do that.' It was kind of a really clear signal, 'Please get out of our way and come back later.'

And so I said, okay, they have a point, because why do I have to do everything on my own? So then I let go and they delivered such a great result. And I said, okay, that's smart. Their people are so motivated and you can recognize the accountability because if they say 'you step out', you bet that they put every, every, every minute into it in order to make it really great and they did a great job. So that was one point in my career when I said, okay, I do have to change and have to trust people. And then the next point was: but then if you do that, then you really have to let go and support the people in what they are doing, support the people in order to make them successful. And this is so rewarding.

Linda Lacina: You have a PhD in physics, and physics is about how the universe works, how everything operates. How has that informed the way you lead? And maybe also some of this systems and ecosystems thinking, you know, how has this shaped you?

Roland Busch: I love physics and I was specializing on theoretical physics. And here comes one point. The cool thing about theoretical physics is you try to describe the world in formulas. In order to do that, since the world is so complicated, you need to simplify. So that means you want to describe certain physical phenomena and you try to simplify it to the point where you really can finally write a formula behind. It's not exact, but it basically gives you a real idea what it is. This kind of thinking helps you extremely well if you have a problem to analyse, to really split the garbage from the real stuff, and focus on what's really important and let others go. I'm pretty good in that and this is a skill which I learned. I think I learned it in this training of, of thinking like a theoretical physicist that helps me when people tell me when they come up with a presentation – maybe again on trains it's a presentation on a business case, but also in technology, what we develop – if there's a weak spot, they tell me 'you need something between one and three questions'. You are sitting on the problem which we which we didn't, didn't in our in our presentation. So that's a certain skill. I think it goes back to my my education. It helps me a lot. Other than that, I'm not really so much into physics anymore, but I would love to.

Linda Lacina: We have time for one last question, sir. And I wanted to ask you, is there a piece of advice that you've had throughout your career that you're just grateful for that's always helped you?

Roland Busch: There was one thing which which was hard to learn. I was in my career, I was running to, I don't know, three or four or five assessment centres. You know, that stuff where you go together in order to be preselected as a little bit outdated. But at that time it was ... maybe it's still on, I don't know. But I was running through these assessment centres and I do believe that quite fast and grasping the situation, understanding it and working on solutions. And I got a feedback again and again and again, 'Roland I mean, it's nice that you've got it already, but let, let the others follow you. listen and this a team work. So hold yourself back and just be a little bit more inclusive.'

It took a while for me to learn it, but this is so rewarding because a team performs in any case, and if it's a diverse team, it's even more so, in any case, better than than individuals, regardless how good you are in whatever you do. So getting this inclusiveness, and including people also who may be a little bit more silent, who are different in thinking, and proactively get them... this is so powerful.

Let me give you one example. When we had our Russia crisis –I mean, you can imagine what that is – the most powerful meetings were when I invited all the disciplines my country heads, my business head, from Russia, but the global business head as well, compliance, communication, legal and to get all these different perspectives into it, everybody was speaking up and giving a different perspective and then we came out after such a discussion, where you really see all our different views, we came to a really an educated decision what to do, what's the next step. And this is so powerful. If you really get this together and you encourage the people really to speak up, that's one lesson learned, which was very helpful.

Linda Lacina: That was Roland Busch. Thanks so much to him. And thanks so much to you for listening.

A transcript of this episode and my colleagues' episodes of Radio Davos are available at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina, with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.