Friday 2024-01-05

Jörg Schock studied civil engineering and began his career at a Capgemini subsidiary in the electronics sector. He soon switched to the automotive division and was to remain loyal to this area for around 14 years, first as a project manager and later as head of the BMW business unit, which grew from 200 million euros to two billion euros in sales under his direction. After various stopovers, he joined HELLA at the beginning of last year. His mission? To drive forward the performance of the Product Center Automated Driving in the Business Group Electronics.

Mr. Schock, you have a great deal of experience in the field of driver assistance systems and automated driving. How are we positioned at HELLA in this area?

We are very well positioned and have great potential. For the next four years, we have set ourselves the goal of growing by 40 percent annually. Of course, we need the right structures and decision-making processes and the right attitude. We have been working intensively on this over the past few months. Since the beginning of last August, we have been restructured with a global matrix organization consisting of customer managers on the one hand and frontends on the other. In this way, we are significantly increasing our pace of implementation and improving interdisciplinary cooperation on an international level. In addition, we have worked a lot on our culture, throwing old and outdated patterns overboard and implementing new, extremely important impulses.

What does that mean in concrete terms?

There was a lot of micromanagement. Every decision, every measure, every idea and every impulse for action had to be checked down to the smallest detail before implementation and approved by a wide variety of stakeholders. This culture slows us down. In a world of speed and change, we simply need more speed: through a more agile and pragmatic approach. Employees have to make much more decisions for themselves, promptly, without eternally long coordination loops. I see my task as a leader in empowering my people, giving them the courage and, if necessary, of course, the support they need to act independently and decisively.

That takes a lot of trust, both on your side and that of your team, right?

Yes, of course. As a leader of an agile team, I need to be able to delegate and let go. And I have to live with mistakes happening. Personally, I've even explicitly encouraged my people to make mistakes. This is the only way you can take action and tackle things courageously. If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn anything. But of course, I am always approachable, support when needed and have my people's backs. My employees know this and they can always rely on it.

But despite all the individual freedom, isn't a certain degree of standardization necessary?

No question. However, this is not a cultural aspect, but one that affects our processes and technologies. In fact, this is about stringent platform development with exact specifications for the customer teams that leave no room for interpretation. In this way, we can reduce our costs and generate more growth with the same staffing levels.

Do you still have time for private hobbies at the moment?

It's all a question of organization. I am also interested in many things in my private life and have always implemented my own projects. For example, years ago I co-founded the non-profit initiative "One Dollar Glasses". The idea behind it is to provide inexpensive glasses to people in need, especially in the so-called developing countries. The project is financed exclusively by donations and works with an innovative, cost-effective manufacturing process. In addition, I am involved in several foundations and always look to the right and left where I can get something off the ground for a good cause.

Quite busy. And what do you do when you just want to relax?

Then I take care of my bees. I breed dark bees, an ancient, endangered German bee species. My few colonies are also quite busy. They produce around seven tons of honey annually. That's quite a lot for a hobby beekeeper like me.

Mr. Schock, thank you very much for the interview.