In the year 2010, we celebrated the 175th anniversary of the Bertelsmann publishing house.60 Few other media conglomerates in the world have such a long tradition and history. Bertelsmann was founded as a Protestant publisher in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its core values of social engagement, providing for employees and their families, civic participation in the headquarters’ location, and developing and supporting social services have been an integral part of Bertelsmann since the beginning. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Bertelsmann and Mohn families founded a school, a kindergarten, and a library in their hometown, and with the creation of retirement benefits and corporate health insurance, they helped define the social principles of corporate responsibility.61 To be part of this legacy is demanding as well as inspiring.
My husband often talked about his parents and grandparents, and his memories were vivid. His family’s Protestant way of thinking had greatly influenced him, and he wanted to build on the things that he had learned as a child. But the volatile history of the twentieth century, and the devastation that National Socialism and World War II brought upon Germany, hit Bertelsmann hard as well. When my husband returned home in January 1946 after being an American prisoner of war, a large part of his hometown—along with his publishing house—was in ruins. His older brother Heinrich had been killed in the war, and his father was very ill. Reinhard was barely twenty-five years old, yet the entire burden of postwar reconstruction lay on his shoulders. Although he was young, he was raised in a tradition of entrepreneurship, and he took on his life’s task completely.62
In all our conversations, as well as in the hundreds of his notes in our company archives,63 he was always thinking about his goals and responsibilities as a business leader. As much as he sought to maintain the tradition of corporate responsibility, he was also very unconventional in his support of new ideas, which he saw as necessary to meet the demands of our time and our modern society. In the 1950s, he developed a system—with his head of distribution, Fritz Wixforth—to create one of the world’s largest book and distribution businesses through the use of catalogs as well as salesmen to deliver books directly into readers’ homes. He then added industry and service sectors. In the 1960s, his was one of the first businesses in Germany to begin to expand internationally.
He never forgot how difficult it was for his business to get bank loans during the early years of postwar reconstruction. To this day, my children still remember the family vacations when “Tata” suddenly had to get on a plane and leave—usually because there was a problem with the bank and he had to make a case for his capital investment needs. The incredible postwar growth brought many challenges, along with sleepless nights and always new and surprising fears and worries. On the weekends, he would often take hour-long walks outdoors trying to clear his head, or he would talk to me about his worries.
Being at the side of Reinhard Mohn, I learned that even a successful business has its highs and its lows and that mistakes are made. But I also realized that a lot can be learned from difficult experiences. Just as a top team can be a boon for any business, personal disappointments must also be dealt with and overcome.
In the face of constantly growing new obligations, my husband decided, after just a few years of heading the company, that he would not be able to fully manage all of the corporate responsibilities and leadership on his own. If the business was to keep growing, a new leadership structure would have to be developed that could keep pace with the company’s rapid expansion. Corporate responsibility and leadership were to be delegated to several creative heads. What seems like standard management structure today was extremely innovative at the time in Germany, for it was a shift from the established patriarchal corporate structure. For this new direction not only meant a surrender of power on the management side; it also put new responsibilities into the hands of the employees, a proposition that was heretofore unknown and caused a great deal of uncertainty.
Suddenly, human resources at Bertelsmann had many new responsibilities: training seminars, consultations, and many time-consuming one-on-one conversations were all part of ushering in this new era. Over the decades, I watched as my husband took part in even the most contentious worker debates. He faced every conflict head-on, because he firmly believed that a company can chart positive growth only if its employees feel connected to their jobs.
As a young man, my husband joined close to one hundred Bertelsmann employees in clearing away the debris and the ruins left after the war, just to be able to get production started again. Working together like this, in the darkest hours, toward a new beginning, led him to an intrinsic understanding of the meaning of partnership. While the unions were skeptical, and the press even called him “Red Mohn,” he held steady in his belief that partnership between employer and employee was the most important aspect of corporate leadership. He wanted nothing more than to convince people of this belief, and he always wanted his employees to be on his side.
As I myself have witnessed countless times, employees can be incredibly creative when given your trust. People who can identify with the goals of their corporation are likely to be more engaged and motivated than are those who feel misunderstood and cannot relate to the objectives of their superiors. The great successes that Bertelsmann enjoyed after the Second World War can largely be ascribed to the corporate culture that my husband developed.64 The powerful forces of motivation, identification, and creativity that he recognized, developed, and implemented into the company structure are the key to the Bertelsmann success story.
As a global media conglomerate with approximately 100,000 employees in more than fifty countries, Bertelsmann is very aware of the considerable economic, sociopolitical, and social responsibilities that it shoulders. While our worldwide dissemination of information, education, and entertainment makes contributions to society, we also strive for economic success and to be at the top of the market. Yet our objective of capital growth is always connected with the core values of our corporate culture. The goals and values that are summarized in the Bertelsmann Essentials65 reflect the basic requirements that are needed for any human interaction. A successful partnership is built on mutual trust and the delegation of responsibility. Employees’ access to information and the sharing of profits are naturally also part of the equation.
We believe that the connectedness and motivation of the individual contribute vastly to the creativity, growth, and efficiency of the whole. We ask all employees to fully take advantage of the responsibilities given to them so that they can act from a position of independent leadership. Nevertheless, the key to success lies in decentralization. Our separate firms operate with the greatest possible freedoms. The result of this decentralization is corporate flexibility and commercial efficiency.
This type of corporate freedom, however, demands a commitment on the part of the employee to align with the interests of the company as a whole. Our firm tries to retain the world’s top creative minds and entrepreneurial talents. Supporting them and continuously developing their skills ensures corporate continuity. We want to be a harbor for creatives and artists, and we are committed to the protection of intellectual property. Our various programs guarantee a plurality of points of view and opinions, and we fully respect artistic freedom and the freedom of the press. While we advocate democracy and freedom of speech all over the world, we also respect the traditions and values of the countries in which we are active.
At the center of all our business transactions is the customer. It’s for him or her that we develop our products and services, and our ongoing success stems from our focus on the customer combined with a continued willingness to innovate. Among all our different businesses, a strict adherence to law and justice, to upholding the highest ethical standards, and to opposing discrimination and harassment at the workplace is our biggest imperative. We expect our coworkers to act with utmost responsibility for their colleagues as well as for their society and their environment. We trust that our endeavors as publishers and as entrepreneurs will bear results that are beneficial to the general public, and we acknowledge our unique responsibility toward our society.
In order to safeguard our company’s independence and continuity, the Bertelsmann Foundation remains our majority shareholder. My husband’s credo was always “With ownership comes responsibility.” To honor this principle, he founded the Bertelsmann Foundation in 1977. Its goal was to bring new energy to what he thought was badly needed reform in Germany. Since the 1970s, he had been dissatisfied with his nation’s performance in many areas. Following Germany’s “economic miracle,” and after numerous social reforms, a certain inflexibility had settled upon the country, which my husband thought was dangerous. In his opinion, a community can remain viable only if its citizens are able to identify with the goals of the state, then develop a sense of personal responsibility for the greater good. In return, citizens expect transparency from their government and want to be able to understand the motivations behind political decisions. Therefore our social goals and political decisions must always be examined, and the results must be measurable and subject to appraisal.
Such a measure of performance, as my husband imagined it, would be based upon a close comparison with other countries and other organizations. With its political, economic, and public projects, the fully operational Bertelsmann Foundation supports the continued development of our democratic systems and builds models for bringing positive change to our society’s structures and institutions.66