Mannerisms

Siemens allocated him to the semiconductor division, then led by Jurgen Knorr, and, after two and half years on Knorr's staff, he was offered the job of marketing either telecommunications chips or DRAM chips. Telecoms chips were a stable and prosperous area. DRAMs were in a mess. He chose DRAMs.

Why? "I had already been through a couple of cycles of taking a challenging job, doing what needed to be done, making many, many enemies and having a big success so that no one could kill you. I knew that my method of working means you have to have a job which allows you, in a reasonable timeframe, to show success. Otherwise you're dead," recalls Schumacher, whose method of working was, basically, to shake things up.

"Nothing was running properly in DRAMs. As an assistant to Mr Knorr I studied and worked on DRAM basically 50 per cent of my time. Everything was wrong - development, sales, productivity, fabs - everything was wrong. On the other hand we had a really good telecommunications business - very good products, very stable," recalls Schumacher.

"I assumed that I could achieve much much more in a much shorter time in DRAM marketing than in telecoms chip marketing. In telecoms, whatever kind of new products you create or design, or influence, the earliest time you can see them in production is three years later, and making an impact in the market takes another two years. So the earliest time you have some result to show is five years. And in five years, the politicians will have killed you - five times".

Why was he so certain that the 'politicians' within Siemens were out to kill him? "Everybody talks about a new management culture but people always just look at it in a unilateral way”, replies Schumacher, “ The culture that you can criticise your boss, that you can have different opinions, that you are loyal to your company and not to your boss - which is a completely different thing - is not the way to make friends".

"In an organisation that is extremely performance-oriented, you love to have this sort of people; in a more stable organisation, you like to kill this sort of people - they are simply disturbing factors," conceded Schumacher, “"I had acceptance from a few people who thought the same way as I did, and resistance from many many established people - especially managers - who saw me as a threat because I always wanted to do the whole thing differently to how it had been done in the past."

An example was the OEM DRAM business. "I wanted to do an OEM (i.e. subcontract) business with DRAMs so that I could direct my own production onto key accounts”, recounts Schumacher, “the management didn't want to OEM the DRAM business. They saw the idea as a threat. It took me nine months to get approval by claiming that I was going to do it with the Japanese who are our friends. Two months later I was doing 90 per cent of my business with the Koreans. So there was always this thing of how to find a path through the organisation".