Bosch leadership principles — what they really mean
“We LEAD Bosch”
Why the all-caps in LEAD? Because we want people to think we’re young and cool and hip and trendy and pretty fly for a bunch of middle-aged white guys. Groovy, right? Also, it lends it an element of gravitas, a certain je ne sais quoi. Shouting also helps selling it, at least it does on the local farmer’s market. And my pinky hit the Caps Lock. Oops.
“We live by our values.”
We hope this colorful picture is sufficient to change the minds and hearts of nearly 400k employees, because we’re out of ideas otherwise.
“We achieve excellence.”
If you believe it, maybe our customers will too.
“We make the purpose of our business clear, and work passionately to make it a success.”
You all know what we do, right? Good. Oh, and be passionate, whatever that is. We read somewhere that passion is the key to success, so there you have it.
“We spark enthusiasm for new things and embrace change as an opportunity.”
We absolutely love change as long as everything stays the same because no one really likes change, they just say they do. ‘Excellence through more bureaucracy’ is our motto! And if you want a methodology for your work our preferred choice is fad-driven development. Oh, wait, there’s design thinking? Wow. No, agile. Definitely agile. Then again, fad-driven development is really, really nice. They even have a T-Shirt. OK, fad-driven development it is. Or maybe…?
“We create autonomy, and remove any obstacles.”
Oh, man, we had a lark when we wrote this one… Basically what we mean: you see problem, you deal with it. We’re up to our necks with paperwork and PowerPoint. Oooh, the text can be made red. Awesome! They have square bullet points now? What is this, the future?! What will they invent next: animations?
“We learn from mistakes, and see them as part of our innovation culture.”
We have a couple of ideas, some real stinkers, but as long as we market them as innovation, people might buy into it.
“We prioritize, keep things simple, make decisions quickly and execute them rigorously.”
Decisions are made immediately after they have gone through a six-month approval process that changes by the time it reaches the final signature. You didn’t see that one coming, did you? Oh, and when we say that we execute stuff rigorously, we mean it: we are 100% committed to all ideas, winners and duds alike, but especially the latter. See, we don’t discriminate against ideas either. That’s real diversity! In your face, companies with female and/or foreign members of the board of directors. Oh, and anyone who says we don’t have women in the board of directors is lying — damn dishonest media! We do have women in the board of directors. Well, close to the board of directors anyway. Secretaries. Lots and lots of secretaries. Yes, well, I’ll show myself out now…
“We collaborate across functions, units, and hierarchies — always focusing on results.”
So, it works like this: if you want your colleague in a neighboring department to do his or her share of the work on a project, which everyone involved signed off on, you have to go to your boss who will escalate the request to his/her boss who will then ignore it. This of course means that nothing will really be done, but at least you followed the correct procedure. Let’s call that a result, OK? Focus on that.
“We communicate openly, frequently and across all levels.”
There is a meeting with at least a dozen people for almost everything. Did we say ‘almost’? We meant to say ‘absolutely’. It’s hard when so many words are in the A section of the dictionary. In fact, there should be a meeting to plan every meeting. Now that we think about that, we can’t let you jump in unprepared like that, so let’s add a meeting to plan the meeting that’s used to plan the actual meeting. And let’s repeat that regularly. There, communication solved. Booyah, we’re on a roll today. Maybe it was the Tequila at lunchtime…
“We seek and give feedback, and lead with trust, respect, and empathy.”
You will receive official feedback once a year, which really means you’ll watch your boss fill out an online form that could have been pre-filled from all the information that should exist in our systems but somehow isn’t. After that it will disappear down the black hole that is HR. We know that many of you think that’s not ideal, but we respect your — in our opinion plain wrong — views, but we empathize. We really do. We trust that patronizing remark will make you a happy subordinate. Good, now off you go then. Let’s spark some enthusiastically innovative open excellence with bells and whistles and chuck in some creatively autonomous and collaborative cross-functional thingamajigs for good measure.
