“You don’t have to know everything yourself. But you do have to know where to get that knowledge.” Albrecht Reimold places a premium on this principle. As Porsche AG’s Member of the Executive Board for Production and Logistics, he fosters intensive dialogue across hierarchies and generations. He therefore regularly invites production employees to spend three months directly observing what he does. “This lets me get to know talented individuals, and gives them a chance to see what a board member actually does all day,” he says. “I can learn a lot from talking with young people in particular. That’s especially true for future-oriented topics like artificial intelligence and digitalization.”
Anyone who seeks to excite as many people as possible about the future will need to draw on inspiration. Here, too, Reimold highlights the role of the entire team. “We have our own innovation task force. Anyone with a good idea can present it to the committee. If the idea is sufficiently promising, they’ll get enough funding to test it. After three or four months, we look at the project together to see the results it has produced. This method has enabled us to bring at least 30 innovations a year into series production. And it has fostered a genuine innovative culture among our employees. Together, they want to help Porsche advance.”