How Not to Journal or The Fall of a CEO

Can you imagine my excitement when handwritten diaries almost 100 years old turned up? And can you imagine my disappointment when I found out 70% of it is my great-granddad complaining about his co-owners of the family business??But then, in his last diary ending in 1938, I found this mysterious acronym:??G. St. Pol.“ - I knew I was onto something…

Who wrote the diaries? And why?

For months, I was not even sure who had written these four diary books with 749 pages, starting in 1927 and ending in 1938: They were written in Kurrent or Sütterlin, a type of handwriting long forgotten, and at first, I was unable to decipher anything but a few numbers.

Then, I found software that helps to transcribe old documents using artificial intelligence. My first attempts mainly produced gibberish, but I was able to ascertain that my great-grandfather was indeed the author! What did he write about people and places I grew up with? To find out, I needed to train the software better. That meant word-for-word edits for at least 20 pages, which took me days to complete.

After four iterations of model training, the smoke began to clear when I decoded the first book from Nov. 1927: These diaries started as the typical notebook of an executive, with my great-grandfather Georg recording the minutes of a shareholders’ meeting of the textiles company he co-owned and managed.?

Family Business Intrigues and Governance Woes

I was surprised to learn first-hand that he did not get along at all with his fellow co-owners and executives! How had he ended up in this mess??

The sudden death of the founder in 1915 left the company ultimately in control of the three children, the founder’s son Heinrich and his two daughters. Georg was married to one of these daughters and, therefore, was asked to join the company's management. They were supposed to jointly run the firm, with no clear delineation of responsibilities and no one in charge. How is that for a case of bad governance? I completely understand Georg’s misgivings about this structure. But why did he spend countless hours complaining about it instead of addressing the root causes (“love it, change it, or leave it”)? I estimate that he wrote more than 500 (!) pages recording in detail how the others did him wrong. But he did not grow strong, and they did not learn how to get along like Gloria Gaynor promised. Instead, things got worse. A lot worse! More on that later…

The Anti-Journal: Focusing on the Negative

A cardinal rule of modern-day journaling is to focus on the good things. In this sense, Georg’s diary is the anti-journal:

• Georg meeting Hungary’s head-of-state Horthy after he was appointed Royal Hungarian Consul in 1928? Deserved a whopping four words in his diary.?
• Georg complaining about an upcoming business trip by co-owner Heinrich? One hundred and thirty words.

Talk about priorities.?

A contentious journaling issue is: Should you write your diary in a way that if someone else reads it, you are not embarrassed? I think that if you keep a journal that primarily serves a business purpose, you should adhere to basic manners. But not Georg! For example, he lists about two dozen employees and their respective salary increases, and most of them receive an epithet, with “good” (4x) being the most positive and lots of colors on the negative end (“swindler & liar”, “old maid”, “dumb”, “dumbass”). Ouch! As CEO, you should ask yourself why on earth would you keep a “dumbass” clerk in a labor market with six million unemployed…

This is nothing compared to the insults he heaps on his brother-in-law Heinrich over the years (liar, “inhuman”, “silly boy”, “beast”, “evil spirit”, to name but a few).

Besides the incessant brother-in-law bashing, as a pricing guy, I was intrigued about one of Georg’s recurring themes: How to properly price a broad product portfolio with very volatile raw material costs, and all of that without the help of spreadsheet software! Already in 1927, he notes how he distrusts the prices set in many sales departments, suspecting that the firm often sells at a loss. His conjectures were officially confirmed in an audit report ten years later (see my comments in another article ).?

Private Life Revealed: Random Facts & Background Checks

Did Georg’s notebook remain focused on business? Because let’s face it: Most of us keep a notebook for business purposes and never think of it as a diary. His first private note occurs only on page 30, on the occasion of his birthday. Only in later years will his personal notes become more prolific, especially as his three daughters grow up, attend boarding schools and universities, and start having suitors. Not surprisingly, Georg, always a stickler for control, leverages his business connections to check the backgrounds of his future sons-in-law. Let’s hope this was not as creepy in the 1930s as it would be today…

I'm unsure if mixing work and personal notes in one journal is a good idea. Personally, I keep them separate and in different places.

The only similarity between Georg's and my diaries is that we both occasionally record random, insignificant facts: He would

• not only record the exact time of his departure and arrival by train and the name of his hotel but also often his room number (e.g., in Berlin, January 23, 1928: Hotel Habsburger Hof, Room 233)!?
• note the ticket price to see Grock, the famous clown, in 1934 (5 Reichsmark per person, in case you were wondering. To put things in perspective, the monthly salary of a rank-and-file employee in accounting was 100 to 150 Reichsmark).?
• record what he buys for Christmas on December 24, 1933 (sparkling wine, a wallet, gloves, cigars, slippers, books, and an oil landscape painting, the latter one cost him 125 Reichsmark!).?

I also learned something nobody in the family had ever mentioned: Georg was a Freemason! At one point, he even ran for lodge master (but someone else was elected).

Witnessing Hitler's Rise to Power and Corporate Challenges in the 1930s

Honestly, what intrigued me the most upon discovering the diaries were the traces of Hitler's ascent to power in early 1933. How did Georg experience that? And did his journaling habits change?

The three things I was most surprised about in his 1933-34 journal entries were:

1. Only one week after the “Enabling Act” of March 1933 (which secured total Nazi control), three SA men came to his company to take away the one Jew working in his office! “Great bitterness”, he writes.
2. Within weeks of the Nazi takeover, various Nazi organizations constantly asked the company for donations, not just the NSDAP at the state level, but also SA, SS, DAF (German Labor Front), etc.
3. In the first few years, Georg repeatedly describes the Nazi strategy for companies as “voluntary coercion”. For example, Labor Day parades: Georg was very upset that the companies were supposed to pay for all the festivities but did not dare to decline, even though there was no legal basis for the demands.

As a cautious CEO, Georg resisted what he saw as excessive demands from his blue-collar and white-collar employees. All trade unions were abolished after the Nazis took control, and the Nazi Party controlled workers' interests through the DAF. This meant that Georg, as CEO, had to negotiate effectively with the Nazi Party. Whenever he opposed the works council's requests, he drew the attention of the Nazis as a troublemaker. After dozens of clashes and a final attack he perceived as dishonorable in 1936, he decided to resign as CEO to stay clear of the DAF. Heinrich took over (and joined the NSDAP).?

Heinrich tried to get rid of Georg before that. In 1934, Heinrich even offered to buy him out, but his offer was so low that Georg felt deeply insulted. In one of his few genuinely personal entries, he writes: "At 10 o'clock in the evening, I lie in bed, tired, angry and worn down. Tears running down my cheeks. Rest comes and with it the will to live and create, even if it is against an inhuman being which I got in marriage" (referring to his brother-in-law Heinrich).

Gestapo Interrogations and Business Intrigue

As I was browsing through Georg’s final diary, looking for pages to transcribe using the software, I came across something I had not seen before: “G. St. Pol.” It took me a while to realize that Georg meant the Nazi’s Secret Police, usually referred to as “Gestapo”!?

Nobody in the family had ever mentioned anything about the Gestapo before, so I was electrified! After transcribing Georg’s last fifty or so pages, a harrowing story unfolded:

In late 1937, Georg received an urgent call from his business partner, G?tze, who insisted on a face-to-face meeting. Recognizing its significance, Georg promptly drove five hours to meet him the very next day. The reason for the urgency was that the Gestapo had questioned G?tze regarding Georg's critical remarks about the government. It seemed that the Nazis had finally caught up with my great-grandfather! Specifically, the Gestapo was interested in Georg's comments about the cotton shortage and how the government used large quantities of cotton for a propaganda event in Munich, leaving insufficient fabric for shrouds in other parts of the country. When questioned by the Gestapo, G?tze denied having heard Georg make these statements.

In utter horror, I read his diary entry for the next day, where Georg openly confirmed the very statement that G?tze had just denied for him! Apparently, Georg believed he could not be punished for telling the truth…

The journaling lesson should be obvious: If you live in a dictatorship, don’t incriminate your friends with journal entries!?

Georg also learned that?

1. the criminal charge had come directly from the Gauleiter’s office (Nazi leader of the state),?
2. one of his employees was actually a member of the Gestapo,?
3. and that yet another employee had made the accusation.?

So the enemy was inside the gates already!?

Soon, he received a summons to appear in court to give his testimony.? In addition to his statement about cotton shortages, Georg was also accused of criticizing the mighty Goebbels himself, which he denied.?

Through his lawyer, Georg learned two weeks later that the case had been sent back to the Gestapo for further investigations.?

And sure enough, within days, two Gestapo men showed up at his office and told him to come with him at once! But before they left, they also asked Georg to hand over his private diary!?

The interrogation took three hours.?

Two new charges came up: that Georg caused the witness G?tze to commit perjury and that his whole staff at the company knew him as being opposed to the Nazis.

Georg insisted that all he did was make comments on the cotton shortage that were factually correct and echoed by a government representative on the cotton council in Berlin.?

After this Gestapo interrogation, Georg did not hear anything for months. Was the case against him not as strong as they thought? The Gestapo wanted to charge him for violating the 1934 Treachery Act. But its first paragraph reads: “Whoever intentionally makes or spreads an untrue or grossly distorted statement of factual nature…” Perhaps the truth did matter, at least a bit?

Then, another blow hit: He got a letter from Heinrich, stating that “competent sources” had told him that “black clouds” lay on the company and Georg in particular. He urged Georg to resign immediately.?

But Georg would not have it!?

The next day, he called for an official shareholders’ meeting, where everybody except Heinrich declared their support for him.?

He also sent his lawyer to speak with Dr. Braun (nomen est omen!), a Nazi official and head of the local Chamber of Commerce, to find out what exactly the “black clouds” were. Dr. Braun identified two main areas:

1. Foreign exchange transactions with Hungary and Holland, and
2. “General unpopularity” of Georg

So his “disparaging comments” were no longer the key charge. Instead, the Nazis had picked up on internal business dealings. How did they know??

Two possibilities: Someone from inside the company had tipped them off, or the Nazis had actively consulted with the treasury that had been investigating the currency transactions for years.???

Could it be that my great-great uncle Heinrich had allied with the Nazis to get rid of his brother-in-law once and for all?

We can't be sure, but what Georg's lawyer discovered later is like breadcrumbs pointing directly to Heinrich: Dr. Braun explicitly stated that Heinrich had brought forth the charges!

In any case, Georg had to fight on two fronts now, the criminal charge for speaking up against the Nazi government and the transactions with Hungary and Holland. Within a few weeks, customs investigators showed up to scrutinize the books yet another time, for days on end, but did not find anything.

On May 11, 1938, Georg learned by accident that two foreign exchange auditors were in the office.?

And then his diary suddenly breaks off.

After eleven years of daily journaling, Georg’s sudden silence was deafening. One of his last sentences reads: “It is an evil spirit that we have been given into the marriage that is extraordinarily depressing.”

He was arrested later that day.

In 1939, he was convicted of having violated foreign exchange rules. So he was not tried for criticizing the government, at least not officially, but the charges were fabricated nonetheless and reversed in 1951 “due to proven innocence”.

After almost a year in prison, he was a broken man with severe heart problems. He never took to journaling again.

On a lighter note, his journaling legacy stuck:?

• In 1954, Georg offered his granddaughter (my mother) 50 DM to keep a diary for a whole year - she made it to July 22.
• In 1984, his daughter (my grandmother) paid me 50 DM to keep a diary for our three-week summer vacation - I made it.?
• In 2010, I started my daily comparative journaling project (still going strong! ????).
• In 2019, I offered my daughters 50 Euros each to journal during our 12-day summer vacation - the 8-year-old squeezed out one day, and the 12-year-old made it through eleven days.

What is the journaling lesson here? I guess monetary incentives have a mixed record.?

However, my principal lesson from Georg‘s haunted diaries is this: Bad governance in a family business can have life-threatening consequences! The onus is on the founder to prevent this from happening. If you are stuck in a setup for failure, cut your losses and run.?

So next time you pick up the pen to continue your daily journaling habit, remember that a hundred years from now, your great-grandson might be reading it with great interest. ??