Step up and step out...

“Don’t be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That’s where the joy and the adventure lie” - Herbie Hancock

As you might have learned from the Siemens press info or elsewhere, I have decided to leave Siemens on December 31, 2019, after 30+ years in this wonderful universe of opportunity for the curious.

From Kazakhstan to Karlsruhe and Perlach to Plano, Siemens provided me with plenty of opportunity to learn and to grow as a person. I am deeply grateful to all the mentors, partners, colleagues and all the friends I made on the way, for prompting and promoting me and my ideas.

A proverb says: “By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn”. I have learned a lot over the past three decades and at this point in my life I have decided to leave Siemens and dedicate myself to “learning by teaching”. I will indulge my passion for teaching as a clinical professor at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA. This will also allow me to spend more time with the people that are closest to me, my family, who have had to make many compromises to support my work at Siemens. In order not to lose touch with Business, I will continue to engage in private equity and serve on the supervisory board of Circor, Inc..

I am very happy that I can handover my excellent team to the capable hands of Hanna Hennig, who will take-over on January 1, 2020. She has many years of experience in managing IT across different industries with companies such as Telefonica O2, E.ON and OSRAM, steering IT organizations through VUCA waters.

It’s not easy stepping out of our comfort zone, but I believe it is an important step if we want to learn, evolve and grow. We do not always need to leave a company or a job to do this, sometimes it’s enough to put aside our preconceptions and assumptions and start listening deeply to the people around you.

I wish for all of us the courage to step up and step out confidently into new adventures, whatever they might be.