An Execution Culture

Peter Loscher is the president and chief executive of Siemens.  He had the following comments regarding organizational culture:

When you talk about leadership culture, I very much try to implement an executive culture.  I think the speed of change has massively accelerated in all aspects.  So there's speed of change, and the world is also far more connected, and this has a massive impact in terms of how you lead.  You can no longer rely on hierarchical structures.

For me, it's very important to have an execution culture in place because it's not about the brilliance of strategy.  In rare instances, a company will do something totally different and build a completely new class of products.  Otherwise you are really in a broad-based competition environment, and therefore must have an execution culture.  And you have to recognize as a leader that you also make mistakes.  I'm always telling people, "Look, I make a mistake every day, by hopefully I'm not making the same mistake twice."  If you think you're not making mistakes, then you are not making the tough decisions that you should make as a leader.