'Empowerment is not anarchy.' How Siemens CEO Roland Busch keeps 320,000 people building everything

Siemens is one of the few companies that has people in every country in the world. And it’s machines and software are woven through every part of the business fabric, from data center cooling systems to USB outlets in hotels to high speed trains to route Angelenos to Las Vegas.

With that reach, it’s easy to appreciate why Siemens has a unique perspective on a range of issues facing every enterprise today — which made catching up with President and CEO Roland Busch at the World Economic Forum in Davos a unique opportunity.

Busch, a physicist by training, started his career at Siemens in R&D. It was the beginning of a 32-year career at the company which landed him in the corner office in 2021. Busch leads a global workforce of 320,000 who (like the rest of us) are adapting to the unprecedented challenges of the nascent Age of AI.?

Which is where we began our talk, with a question from one of the thousands of LinkedIn Premium members watching live: What leadership qualities are needed now to meet the moment?

"The first one I would pick immediately is growth mindset," Busch told me. "You have to stop thinking about the event of the emergency. You learn something and you deploy it for the rest of your life." As Ray Dalio repeats all the time, pain + reflection = progress. You take the knocks but you don't dwell on them, you find the lessons from them.

"?Everybody learns differently," he added. "Some people are learning and reading a textbook. Others are checking for YouTube videos and others by talking to each other. So figure out what's your learning mode."

Roland is a "growth mindset" superfan. Unlike his peers who I've talked to recently — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins,? Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill — Roland is less a believer on EQ to get ahead than being all in on growth mindset.

"The limit is not your IQ or EQ," he said. "The limit is basically how hard you work on it. But learning also from mistakes — you have to make mistakes. If you innovate and every time you get it right, you didn't really go far enough."

We also talked about how you manage a company as massive as Siemens. He loves going deep on problems and reaching out in the org to learn what people are doing. Hearing from subject matter experts is essential to him. But that's where he stops. "Don't micromanage," he said. "Empowerment is not anarchy. Even if you think, ‘I would do it differently,’ let them do what you believe they are good at — and accountability comes with empowerment."

Busch emphasized that managing a big business while looking to innovate is a delicate balancing act - something that many companies, including Siemens, have failed at in the past.?

"If you think disruption is all about having the best product, that's only half of the story," Busch said. "The other half is, does your salesforce sell it," he said. “It’s not only technology, it’s the way you go to your market.”?

In our conversation, Busch weighed in on the power of mentorship, why he doesn't suffer from imposter syndrome, and more. Click through for Part I — we'll share Part 2 next week.

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving difficult problems. See more from Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant, Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, former US President Barack Obama, filmmaker Spike Lee, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, cosmetics legend Bobbi Brown, F1’s Toto Wolff, and many more.