Jim Hagemann Snabe: The Reinvention of Everything

And if we bring hardware and software, the reality world and the digital world closer together, we can dramatically improve the fiscal world and that should be our attention. Welcome to the special English edition of Degorsa Neustadt, a German podcast series by Zabilla Bad, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who, inspired by the World Economic Forum's great reset initiative, create revolutionary projects that actually do make our world smarter, greener and fairer. I'm delighted to welcome as my guest today Jim Hargemann-Snaber, Chairman of Germany's leading industrial group Siemens, board member of C3AI, the new chair of the Swedish Battery Startup Norsefold and member of the Board of Trustees at the World Economic Forum. Jim Snaber is known for his pioneering leadership of some very substantial companies, recently taking AP Mellomersk, the Danish conglomerate that dominates container shipping, into a new era. The Financial Times called him one of Europe's leading industrialists and transformational leaders. Before that, he worked for two decades at the giant software company SAP, running it as co-CEO for four years. Jim is also a co-author of the two books Dreams and Details, Re-Invent Your Business and Your Leadership from a Position of Strengths and Tech for Life, Putting Trust Back into Technology. He founded the Dreams and Details Academy and is a young professor at the University of Copenhagen. With such a rich career, there is so much to talk about. The economic transformation, the force industrial revolution and stakeholder capitalism. Dream big and turn the dream into an achievable goal. The role of technology in climate change and globalization and last but not least polar bears and the power of positive stories. A very warm welcome to Jim Snaber. Jim, I'm really pleased you made the time to talk to me today and looking at your entire profile, you are the quintessence of a positive story. So how did it all begin? Well, thank you, Sebel and thanks for having me. Great question. It's always good to reflect back. I guess my optimism is partly driven by the fact that I grew up on Greenland and you know, if you are used to very cold weather, you better stay optimistic about the future and your survival. No, I think in many ways I have been lucky in my life and my career. I had plenty of opportunities and then many people, much more experienced than me, believed in me and that gives you a sense of optimism. And I was lucky also to complete my studies in 1989, the year when the Berlin Wall fell. So the world got twice as big and the World Wide Web was invented. So technology became a force of opportunity and I think both of those events that happened randomly have propelled opportunities towards me and I've been lucky, probably also ambitious and curious enough to take some of those. So I guess that's the short version of my optimism. We will talk about Greenland a little later. Just go back to you joining SAP in 1990. You joined the SETRANEE and became co-CEO in 2010. So it sounds, of course, the career sounds brilliant, but also easy. Was it easy for you? Well, it was maybe lucky in the sense that I was lucky to get involved with technology early. And as I said, technology has been the driver of value and opportunities now for decades. But also lucky enough to find arguably the only European global leader in tech and software, at least SAP. That was not obvious when I started. We were a couple of thousand people. I joined this trainee program and so little did I know that SAP would become this giant. So it's a story of a company in constant growth, exponential growth, actually. And that comes opportunities. It's also a story of not voting on for my role, but always being asked to take the next role. And with that, of course, propelling the opportunities into a career that had many corners and therefore created a very broad foundation for the opportunity to one day become the co-CEO with my good friend, Bill McDermott. And you were also very young. You were 45. What meant leadership at the time for you? I mean, it was a global company already, so it was a big role. And I think most of all, it meant reinventually. It's funny how I had been lucky not just to find SAP and be part of that journey, but I had seen SAP reinvent itself a couple of times already when it was actually doing quite well. In the early 90s, I just had joined suddenly the Hasselblatt and Atte Division of the next version of technology. And that propelled the company from a position of strength into the next level. And so when Bill and I took over the CEO role or co-CEO roles, we agreed that we would be ambitious about it and we would try to again sign, say, the next opportunity for SAP. And that became very much the mantra of my leadership, look for the opportunity and try and reinvent when you're strong, because when you are strong, you have the means to do that. If you wait until you are weak, you have to catch up and you don't have the same financial strength. Looking back, we know that you don't like looking back very much, so we will limit the time. How has the role of technology and the role of business changed since then? Well, I do look back not because I like it, but I think we need to learn from the past, but we should avoid projecting the past into the future because then we never get change. And I think your question is super valid because both technology and business has changed quite dramatically, at least in the time I have been a business lead-up. It's almost like technology went from being the solution to everything, which I think it still is in many ways, but now this technology is so powerful that it also becomes a risk for being misused like powerful technologies are. It becomes a risk or even our democracy. So we have to be careful about how we use technology and then use it with the right intent. And business, when I started in business, it's almost like it had a narrow focus on shareholder value. And in the meantime, it is clear to me that business and business leaders play a major role in also societal progress. And therefore, I take a very broad definition of the role of business. And I believe business leaders had an obligation to find a path through a better future, not just for their company, but for their industry and society at large. And we said you were quite young when you took over the executive leadership. So everybody's dream is to become a CEO of a global company. You are a CEO of a global company and you say, and what's now? So you decided 10 years ago to shift your role from the executive to the supervisor reward and kind of never look back. So what is so attractive about the other side? Well, first of all, I must say that I really enjoyed the role as an executive. And in particular, Bill McDermott, I had developed a truly remarkable friendship and partnership in driving the reinvention of SAP. So it was by no means an escape from that. I really enjoyed that. And what I enjoyed with that is that you can inspire people. You can stand on the chair and the cantina and create followership and excitement because you're so close to the business. That changes when you become non-executive chairman or chairman of a supervisor report. The benefit that I have seen and that inspired me a lot is that I've always said, if you are in a role, stop digging. And in many ways as an executive, you are digging all the time, not to do in a big hole, but you are digging. You are in the action. And it's when you take a step back from the action that you see the big picture. And if anything, at these times of radical change have allowed chairman in particular to take that step back and always remind everyone, why are we doing this and have the focus on the strategic intent and the transformation of the company rather than on the actual doing of it. I think that has really inspired me. And in many ways, I believe we limit this inflection point now where everything is changing and then this stability becomes even more important, but also more joyful because the opportunities and risks seem to be almost unlimited. I asked chat GPT what is the difference between being CEO and chairman. And of course, it was a long answer came up. But the main thing was, the main difference is the focus. So one is the big picture as a strategy keeping a company ethical and transparent. And the other one is actually more or less doing the daily job. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think there's a good separation between that. That's a little bit what I call digging the hole versus looking at the big picture. I have another simple definition and on the joke by saying the CEO is there to answer the questions. The chairman is allowed to ask the questions. And I have seen that if you really consider the questions very well, it is an extremely powerful opportunity to transform companies by asking the right questions. In the right sequence. So what would be the right questions to ask the right question? Let's start with one being chairman of Siemens. I think the question to ask now the most important question there are many, of course, is how do we think the world will look like five to 10 years? And what do we need to do today to not only stay relevant in that future, but lead the transformation towards that future? Well, put differently, how would we like the world to look 10 years from now? And what do we need to do today to lead that transition? I say that because in many cases, the board is focused on the last four or the last fiscal year. In my boardrooms, I spend as much time as possible on the future, not the past, and on asking questions that allow us to shape the future rather than becoming victims of the future. Shaping the future takes me straight to the fact that dreaming big features large in your life. What does dreaming big mean to you? It is about, it's almost like imagining a better future. And I think one of the uniqueness of human beings is that we have this ability to imagine something that isn't. There's a nice quote from Bernard Shawl, who says, most people look at things they are and ask why. I look at things they aren't and ask why not? And I think that is the dreaming part, this ability to imagine something that isn't and ask why isn't it and what do we need to do to get there? Why is this so on court? I think that it is the fundamental way to inspire people to pursue things that even seem impossible. It is when we get them to dream. Human beings have incredible capacity if they pursue dreams and imagine what happens in companies if we create dreams that are relevant for people in such a way that they are eager to pursue them in greater teams, then there's almost unlimited opportunities. And most of all, dreams create followership. And I think that in essence is the definition of leadership in my world, is that you will have ownership, people who are inspired by where we are going and willing to do what it takes to get there. And can you remember when you first realized that you might think a little bigger than anybody else? Yes, I actually remember that. First of all, I gave a speech many years in a business school in Europe about all my mistakes as a leader. And it's by the way a good exercise because it makes you reflect on leadership and what works and what doesn't work. And I realized that every time I was very logical and I am a very logical person, I'm a manametician at the court. When I was very logical, it seemed like it did not inspire people so much. It spoke to their brains but not their hearts, so to say. And in 2008, I was on a journey with the Insia, the business school in France, and we went to India and I saw some of the poorest people on the planet and some of the richest people on the planet. And I was in the middle of some of the challenges that this world has. And I realized that leadership is the solution to all of these problems and that business leaders could do so much more. And that actually initiated my dreaming about what could SAP become that it was not. And how could SAP play a role in improving the state of the world while at the same time doing good in business. And let's stay with SAP. So what happened then when you asked this question? Well, it turned out that when you asked the question and it really goes down to the question around why do we exist as an organization and you dig deeper and deeper into that. SAP was arguably a very successful software company but in this essence it was managing resources for enterprises. And we asked ourselves what if SAP could do more than just manage traditional resources for enterprises. What if SAP could be managing scarce resources for the planet. And that became kind of the dream that propelled our growth strategy, our desire to not only improve businesses but improve the world and the lives of people. And it fueled innovation and unleashed human capacity at a level which I didn't even think possible in business. Gratitude to the people who got excited and took the lead on that kind of a big dream for SAP. And yet you moved on to AP Mülermers, the biggest shipping company in the world. And you went there to transform it. And I actually thought after digging a bit into your career, I thought he probably went there and said, was somebody else with your ship, can we fly to the moon? Was it perhaps a little like that? Yeah, it was first of all a company with incredible history and in a very, very strong culture. A little bit like Siemens family founded company more than 100 years old. And yet a company that had a little bit forgotten the reinvention and was optimizing the current, which was becoming more and more challenging. So the transformation at the beginning was about saving a company and in some sense we had a lot of debt and we had that, that we were making losses. It was a story of focusing the company rather than being a conglomerate and seeing me through seminar efforts at Siemens. I think focus enables companies to be faster and before size used to be the important part of strategy. Now it's really speed or innovation. And so focus gives you that. And then in the second iteration, once we began then to see the benefits of a more focused transportation company with a more customer oriented approach, we invented the big dream, which was the dream of decarbonizing shipping, which is really a difficult one. So it's a dream because it's a hard to obey industry. You can't just electrify that industry. You have to find another way to decarbonize. And we went for this big dream without knowing how to do it. A little bit of moonshot approach where you believe in your importance in the industry because we were the biggest shipping company and have the courage to lead a dramatic shift rather than an incremental shift. And that transformed in many ways the company in a quite radical way and again on the human potential like I have never expected. And you were mentioning before that it helps when one is in a position of strengths. Would you have joined the company if it would have not been like that? Well, actually, mask was not at a position of strengths at the time. And 16, it had a debt of 16 billion dollars and made a loss of 1.9 billion dollars. So it was actually an example of how you should not wait too long with the brilliant venture. But with the family ownership, you get to the lead for the long run. And that allows you to do the things that are necessary. And so we did quite dramatic shifts. We found new owners for all of the energy and gas related businesses. We used the money to pay some debt off but then innovate the transportation industry. And we hired 5,000 IT professionals to leverage the data, the transportation company like MassPedest. And of course, then we took on this massive task of b-carbonizing the industry. So it was a transformation in multiple phases. And I think it took quite a long time, five years, because we started late and we're not in a position of strengths. We had to do initial efforts to regain strength and then we could bring big by only. So the company was not in a position of strengths when you took over. What would be your recommendations for SMEs now for small, medium-sized companies that have missed the decarbonization train completely and are currently going through the green shift and the economical transformation? I think it starts with challenging one fundamental assumption that most people have, namely that decarbonization is a cost. And so we have this fundamental assumption that we earn our money by polluting the world and delivering our products and services. And then we decide how much of our profit should be used then to do good again in the world. And I think we have this tipping point, this inflection point in history where if you provide services and products that help the world decarbonize, your products and services will be in high demand. And therefore it becomes a question of how you make your money. I.e. at cement functions, the more wind turbines we sell, the more revenue we make, and the more decarbonized the world gets, the more electric and hydrogen trains we produce, the more money we make, and the more decarbonized the world gets. And so it's a shift mentally from a cost, which is kind of something you want to avoid and minimize to an opportunity, which is something you want to maximize. And that I think is the mental shift. Once you get over that, you will realize that most of the things you can do to accelerate decarbonization is a good business case. And where it's not, you need to innovate and drive the innovation so it becomes a good business case. And I am convinced that like it was true for the oil industry, you know, 60 years ago, those who were first at grabbing this opportunity created enormous wealth. Some of the biggest and most valuable companies on the planet were oil companies some years ago. I think that that category would be in the companies that accelerate the sustainable solutions for the world because we are at that entration point right now. You recently took over as a chair at the sustainable battery startup Northwold. Would that be a company that you would say they do it right? It's a great example actually of a company that's born with the right idea. How do we make batteries green? And they make batteries green in two ways. First of all, they make a carbon neutral factory. And I know them because Siemens was providing a lot of the technology to set up a factory like that. But most importantly, they have come up with this innovation to recycle the batteries. And so they're actually able to reuse more than 95% of all the materials in the battery. And with that suddenly we have raw materials that are cheaper than the ones you dig out of the soil. We don't have a resource problem because there is enough lithium and copper and nickel if you just reuse it again and again and again. And the business case is also convincing. I mean, the company has an order book of more than 50 billion euros. And so that proves to everyone that the sustainable solution for the future is a very attractive business opportunity. And Northwold is one of those who could be the winner. What about the battery companies that exist in Europe? They will be challenged because they don't have this end to end or circular business model where they produce batteries and install them in cars and what have you. And then that's it. Where Northwold is designed circular from the beginning. So they actually get the batteries back and reuse them. And as I said, that becomes a better business, not a worse business. And therefore it's a great example now. And that case, it's not a reinvention because the company started from scratch with the right idea. But most of the existing companies out there, of course, they come from a world of, you know, fossil fuels being the assumption and, you know, waste pool value change being the rule. And we need to change that. Imagine we can reuse all materials again and again and again. And if we can do all of this without any fossil fuels, that is not only great for the environment and our planet, but it's also maybe the biggest business opportunity ever. Yeah. You convinced of that? I am absolutely. And there are not enough examples of this. In Denmark, we have rusted and the company, they went from hostile world to a green world. I think they quadrupled the value of the company. You know, at SAP, we doubled the value of the company when we began to think in resource optimization across value chains. Siemens is having its highest price rate since 20 years. And that in the middle of a, you know, a situation with war and inflation and uncertainties by chains. And there's a shift going on. And I think that while we look at a zero growth market in general, in average, I think that consists of a rapid decline in fossil-based value propositions and a dramatic growth in sustainable value propositions like Northwalt, like Siemens, like Airt, or Musk. And so while in average, it's zero, it doesn't mean that everything is zero. As I said, Siemens is seeing the biggest growth rates in 20 years. And that is quite remarkable given the size of the company. Yeah. Yeah. Can I just ask a different question? Because it strikes me, we assume that, yes, that is the direction we take. That's the right direction, no doubt. What about the oil and the gas industry? Is there not fighting it? Well, again, I think there's a mindset and this is why some companies tend to fail in the reinvention and others succeed. That, you know, the companies that hold on to the old world too long, they tend to lose out. They're prolonging the pain, so to say. And the companies that embrace the new world early enough, I think they create new opportunities. If I was an oil and gas company, I would embrace this idea of green fuels. I'd be liquid or gas fuels that can be burnt and create energy or propulsion and do not have any CO2 emissions included because they're just a different chemical compound than fossil fuels. And I just look at the mass example of decarbonization. That means in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 million tons of green fuel, the fuel all of it is 750 vessels. There is a huge market coming and the demand for this kind of fuel will be much, much higher than the supply. And in my world, that translates into great business opportunities. So imagine you have a history in fuels and now you swap the fuels from the fossil world with the sustainable fuels and you can use many of your assets and your capacities and help accelerate decarbonization instead of becoming a victim of a change that must happen. Well, that sounds very logical. You are, and it comes as no surprise, a member of the Board of Trustees at the World Economic Forum, an organization known for its ambition to improving the state of the world back to dreaming big. In which activities are you involved that help to achieve that goal? Well, I think first of all, the World Economic Forum is mostly known for its meaning in dowels, which is a quite remarkable gathering of business leaders with huge impacts. But that is in many ways a week in the year, in January, where the climate is cold and business and policy makers come together to discuss and decide and accelerate some of the past to that future. So one of the big things that I've been arguing is that, well, there are 360 days between two dowels meetings. And it's really about the activities on those days. And I think the big transformation on the World Economic Forum is to go from being an organization that convenes very powerful leaders and dowels to also being an organization that orchestrates the collaborative efforts needed to decarbonize for instance the world. So one of the projects that I've been heavily involved in is of course things around decarbonization. The World Economic Forum has been driving a unification of the ways we measure ESG, so environmental and governance-related activities, so that we can enhance our accounting rules to not just be focused on the financial accounting, but also be focused on the non-financial parts of business. Yeah, yeah. So the forum had been also on the forefront of the multiple stakeholder model for more than 50 years. And it was actually Professor Schraub who just before you came and talked a lot about the importance of having this multiple stakeholder approach. It is a wonderful idea which we do support. However, how do you apply the model in the organizations you steer? Well, I think that's a great question and one where I may have a different approach than the average approach to this. I think that the multi-stakeholder idea that truly was invented by Schraub more than 50 years ago is a nice way to describe the impact of business, not just for its shareholders, but for all of its stakeholders. So that's the multi-stakeholder. And so I love the idea and it's very much in line with the aha moment I had in 2008 when I was in India. My approach and the way I apply this in the organizations I steer is to assume that there is not a zero sum from game. So it's not like the organization can create a certain value and now we need to discuss where does the value go? Does it go to the shareholder, the employee, the planet, how do we distribute the value of the company's creating? I am assuming that it's not a zero sum game, that you can do activities in that it value the same activity to all stakeholders at the same time. My simple example of building more electric trains will give more jobs, it will give more revenue and profit at FIA, for the shareholder, for the employee, it gives solutions to a country like Egypt who will hopefully get one of the most advanced train systems in the world with the big order they have entered into with C-teams and it helps them reduce their CO2 emissions on transportation by 70% compared to the day once that train system is up and running. So it's a good example of one effort that actually creates value to all three or four stakeholders. And so the way I apply it is almost like I'm adding extra lines, not just the profit and loss line, but also profit for the planet, profit for the employee, profit for the customer. And with that, the impact of the business is suddenly dramatically better than just its own profit. And how realistic is that having the profit for the people, the profit for the planet, the profit for the company, etc. How do you take this company into the next decade? I think that if you had asked that question 20 years ago, I would have been struggling with a good answer. Maybe it would have an optimistic answer, but it would be hard to argue that there is an overlap between the goals. Now there is, and the reason is that with the technological advancements, we suddenly have an opportunity to create solutions that are sustainable and cheap. In some industries, we talk about a greening premium. Well, when, you know, when, when Siemens is making an electric train, we don't have a greening premium. We just have a better train that's also good for the environment. And it is true now with the technological development that a kilowatt hour of energy produced by solar or wind is cheap. And the one produced by coal and fire our plants. So why we continue to invest in fossil fuel based electricity when we can make it cheaper with sustainable raw materials like the wind or the sun? It's very hard to beat the price of the raw material in sustainable energy because the price for wind and the price for the sun is zero. And that's true for a barrel of oil. And we at that tipping point now and then it suddenly accelerates. And I think we just have to inspire more people to look for the innovations that create that tipping point where the green version is not only better, but also cheaper. But if we look at the role of the green shift and technology and everything and that we are in the middle of the force, industrial revolution and Siemens as a leader of industry 4.0, we have to look also at the other side. Currently, and I looked that up at the United Nations, currently it looks like 17% of the world's population, 1.3 billion people have not yet fully reached the second industrial revolution because they lack access to electricity. And more than half of the world, 4 billion people have not yet reached the third industrial revolution because they do not have any internet access. And actually when one drives to Germany sometimes one wonders where we are part of it. Do you believe we can or should create a more equal world? And yeah, and how would it look like in practical terms? So first of all, I think these are great reminders of where the world is that we have 1.3 billion people still not having access to electricity and 4 billion people without internet access. And we in our part of the world assume that all to be the case except for when we drive in some roads in Europe. Now that problem can only be solved through technology again. And I think the best example I have is almost like we need the developing countries to lead frog into a technology level, which is just much better and cheaper than the iterations we've had in our world. I think the good example is the telephone. In our part of the world, we first installed a line, fixed wired telephones and spent an awful lot of money doing that. It was a pretty costly experience also for the consumer. And in Africa, they jump lead frog directly to the mobile world. And the penetration of mobile technology in some of these countries is quite astonishing. Actually, even the connectivity, I used to come in love to Wanda and I can assure you the connectivity of mobility in Kigali Wanda is significantly better than some places in even Kokodane. They had drones that fly medicine around navigating with jumbles. And I think that's what we need as well. On energy, it is going to be solar that is now so cheap that it can be installed everywhere. The issue is the battery because otherwise you only have storage or energy in daylight and you need the storage capacity. But in our work for the North Pole can help solve that problem. So as you can see, it is innovation around affordability. We need to build around host levels that allow all countries to participate. I think this will happen for the electricity as well as the internet relatively soon. And there are some quite interesting projects around satellite-based internet connections that could provide extremely cheap internet to those countries. And suddenly everyone would be online. So innovation continues to be my answer to many of the issues. And now we have the technologies to do it. Yeah, because you mentioned Rwanda, I recently noticed that the World Economic Forum set up its center for the fourth industrial revolution in Rwanda. And all of a sudden people and companies talk about Rwanda as the new tech hub or the new hub and lots of things are going on. My question to you would be why Rwanda and not Nigeria, Tanzania? I think Rwanda has been one of the extremely positive examples. Your first question today was the positivism of Africa, a country that had a genocide in our, what, 20-some years ago that was in a disaster. And over two and a half decades had become one of the most great examples of progress. Everyone goes to school. I was involved in the school project in Rwanda. I was impressed by the development around the school system. They had mobile technology. It's one of the cleanest countries on the planet, which is a cultural impact that they've had, where they clean up their country every last Sunday of the month. And so it's a good example. And I think Rwanda was chosen because you have the necessary political leadership and progress and advancements that you can experiment with some of the new technologies in an environment where cost is the key part. And so it's a good parameter to design around. Yeah, that takes me also to your book, actually, the Dreams and Details Re-Invent Your Business, where you talk about it. Is Rwanda, if you move away from the companies now, an example for that? I think so. I mean, of course, it was not reinvented from a position of strength after a genocide, but that was maybe the wake up call for everyone to create a dream for the future. But there was a lot of details in executing that plan. There has been a lot of policies that have been progressing the country. You know, every child must go to school. Every Saturday won a cow. And now technology advancements that are quite astonishing, not just compared to other African countries, but to many European and Western countries. So it's a great example that even in the poorest regions of the world, with little infrastructure, dreams come true. If you invest the necessary leadership and the details in all that matter the most, then the right sequence. Yeah. Going from Worms from the south to the north to Greenland, you have a strong affinity with Greenland. You said you spent a large part of your childhood there. And I read it must have been probably a year ago, linked in that you went back to Greenland with your wife. So how was it? What's the difference now? It is true. I had this unique opportunity to go on an expedition early this year, which is still wintertime in Greenland. It was actually to the northeast of Greenland, which is a natural reserve where you don't come on this expedition. It's an area, it's a national park, one million square kilometers big, so far. And there's not much, but ice and cold and polar bears and some seals. And it's kind of a survival trip. You sleep in tents in minus 20 degrees and you use dogs to move from one place to the next place. And it's a lot of hard work. Now a few things became clear to me in that experience. First of all, we take many things for granted and we sometimes believe that we are the masters of this planet. And when you are in such environments, you realize that you live there on the conditions defined by nature, not the other way around. So you have great respect for nature. You feel very, very small. Secondly, we actually had days where the temperature was above zero. Normally it is an average around minus 15 to minus 20 degrees Celsius. And I posted a picture on LinkedIn where I'm sitting in a T-shirt. And that makes you think, wow, in the middle of this ice, what happens if this melts? So I actually began to study that. I had lived in Greenland for seven years, but I didn't know the answer. I was assuming that if the inland ice on Greenland would melt, it would be probably lifting the oceans some 30 centimeters. To my surprise, I found out that the answer is that the oceans would rise six to seven meters if all the ice and Greenland would melt. And you could just hear them melting on the ice with a plus five degrees when you're supposed to have minus 15. So I think it gave me this urgency as well that I'm tired of people talking about this. And I'm tired of people protesting about this. And I am becoming very friendly with everyone who's doing something about this. And we need to game up and do it faster. You speak very often about that we need a more radical approach to reinvent things. How radical? I think very radical. A little bit like the radicalism we had at Merz when we said we're going to be carbon neutral by 2050 and have the first Western sailing by 2030 without having any idea of how to do this. That is radical. Normally we have business cases and proven technologies and we don't dare to dream. We just, this is plans. And I think we need to be radical when we made that radical decision, which was courageous move by management. We thought it was almost impossible. And only four years later, when I was still chairman, we moved the deadline from 2050 to 2014. Which means something that seemed impossible only four years earlier became accelerated within four years to be 10 years ahead of the impossible plan. And I think the same is true for many of the big dreams in this world. Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely within the end of this decade. And they did. And don't forget they did that with the computer technology, which is what we use in the singing birthday card today. And so if that was possible in 1969, sorry, then it seems like there's nothing less impossible with today's technology. If we have the courage to dream big and lead the change. Yeah, you were also highlighting before that we need more positive stories. And it is unfortunate that in the time when we needed most business leaders seem to be overwhelmed by this multi layered global change they find themselves in, that we actually lack positive examples, positive stories about how we can turn companies around, make them fit for the next decade at least. And of course, in addition to that, we can't rely on the media. We can't rely on politicians. We can't rely on XYZ. So what should we do? I mean, should we create a new television station, a new media empire? I think you're onto something super important and I argue that a lot. I think we need to balance our, you know, news somehow. It seems like the bad stories get the biggest attention. We have social media platforms who are designed to create engagement and engagement comes from catastrophe. So that is being amplified on those media. If you are a young person today, you must be terrified by the world we live in. And yet if you look at the facts, the world has never been better. We have listed a million people out of poverty. We have technologies that can solve most of our issues. And we don't have a world war. We've had that in the past. We do have war in Europe, so there are concerning elements. But the fundamentals, you know, what we're capable of, look at how we dealt with COVID. We were able to produce and mass produce vaccinations in record time if we collaborate. So I remain optimistic even though there are many forces that go the other way. And I think the forces that go the wrong way are fueled by the negativism that we unfortunately see by most media in particular social media. So I have taken upon me to try and spread some of the good stories. I gave a TED talk in October 21 about big housing shipping. It got rapidly one and a half million views. And I'm part of the future forum that the TED organization has created to find business leaders who have done it and who can talk about what they have done so that we inspire the world. And it's not only possible, but it can be done much faster than we think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk. I know that you're very busy and we are probably reaching here the end of our time very soon. Let's come back to the story. You are a book author. And we know or you know that depending on a subject, right, something meaningful, it takes probably up to a year, one and a half years. Today, and I checked it again with chat GPT-4, it takes a week, maybe less of a week. Here's a question for you as both an author and a champion of technology. What does AI do to our ability to learn, to experience and to express ourselves as human beings? That is probably one of the most important questions I've had for a very, very long time. And I do believe that in chat GPT, this generative AI is a step change in technology and it has moved the world from somebody heard about AI from now. Everyone kind of begins to understand how powerful it is. It is massively powerful. That's why I started studying AI when I actually stopped my job at SAP. I had time to study again. And that's why I'm now at C3 AI, meeting AI platform company in the US. And I am excited and terrified by the opportunity. I think the way you asked the question is the essence because it talks about what can AI do to our ability to learn and experience. And I think if we use this technology right, it will be the first time actually in maybe a hundred years that we have a reinvention of our learning system. So that we can have exponential learning and experience building because this engine can crawl so much data and give us so relevant answers to our questions. It's almost like we need to learn how to ask the right questions again. But you can see how my role as chairman is becoming very, because that is the essence. If we ask the right questions, we can accelerate learning like never before. And I think the key thing to all of this is the last words you said, you know, how do we express ourselves as human beings? The answer that a chat GPT will come up with is an artificial answer. It will never take away the human value and our unique abilities to imagine things that are not to, you know, to love and to express ourselves with emotions. I think that is always going to be what the humans have unique. And that's why I will continue to be an author when I will let some of the fact findings and some of the, let's say the machine parts of a book be found by AI. And I will add the human dimensions, almost like if we use this technology well, we get more time to be humans. And we should cherish that and embrace that and then use technology in a way that enhances human capacity and values, not the other way. And you believe that the technology will stock where it is and it won't go the way that they try to copy human emotions? I think that the value of copying human emotion is as low. I've never understood why we have so many efforts trying to make a robot that looked like a human being. Why would we try and mimic something we already have? I would much rather use the technology for the things where you don't need to be human. And that's a little bit my point. Maybe AI can one day act like human, but I'm asking myself, is that what we want? And in my book, Take for Life, the argument, the main argument is that we cannot put rules around innovation. Innovation will always be faster than policymaking, but we can put human values into technology. And we can use technology not for what it is able to do, but what it is supposed to do. I.e. how do we steer, how do we shape the future by using technology in an intelligent way instead of misusing technology just to make, for instance, money if it destroys our democracy. Is that really what we want? Is that what we want? I don't think so. And I think it's very dangerous. There's always been the case that with powerful technology comes powerful risk. And, you know, somebody invented nuclear energy and then it became also a weapon. And the same is true for AI. Now, my plea to everyone is that we use the, let's say the human rules that we have in the physical world. In the physical world, we don't steal things from each other. Or at least that's not an acceptable way of acting. Why do we allow companies to steal data? We don't all keep the things. Can I go straight into that? Why do we? What's missing here? Who is not doing the job? I think we are naive. We don't understand the implications. We get excited about the technology's capability. But we forget that that's not human. That's not acceptable. And if we were just to apply, let's say, the fundamental human values that we have in the physical world, and we would not have these problems, we would have to. And the book tech for life basically asked people who are involved with technology, whether they're programming it or leading a startup or a billionaire already, think before you do anything, would you do this in the physical world? Would you use those words in the physical world? Think we do on social media. It's appalling. It's not even in the Google map. It's disaster. Would you make business models that steal things? You wouldn't. And I think that's it. So as technology can do more and more, it's almost like the counterbalance to that is that we need to be more and more human. And maybe we need to find the poets in ourselves and embrace love and care and allow technology to do the things that really had nothing to do with human but help us refocus our time for being. And in the physical world, am I allowed to ask you two more questions? Yes. Are we creating an even wider gap between our physical and digital world? And do you believe that people will be able to cope with permanently switching worlds? No, I think we need to bring the two worlds together. You are absolutely right. Currently, we are widening the gap between the physical and the digital. And in many ways, my departure from SAP and my engagement with companies like Siemens and Mesh, what I call companies with real things, not just software things, is an attempt to try and lead the world towards bringing hardware and software closer together. So we don't try and build a, let's say a virtual world, some call it a meta-rust, which is this perfect virtual world where everything is fine and we kind of lose interest in fixing the real world. That's where we need to put our attention. And if we bring hardware and software, the real-energy world and the digital world closer together, we can dramatically improve the physical world and that should be our attention. We are here. We have a unique plan is and it doesn't help us to create a virtual version of that, even though it's easier. It's like we need to solve the real problems, the physical world, and we use technology to do that. Then we're on a path for progress instead of the opposite. Ending this wonderful conversation now. I would have more questions for another hour, but you unfortunately don't have the hour. Looking at your career, it strikes me that you're perhaps a person that does not really hold on to a powerful position or an office for very long that I found quite surprising. So what value does power hold for you and what's next in the positive story of Jim Snabel? I think that my philosophy has always been that my role was to go into some tasks, understand the current, try and find a path or a reinvention progress, and then find someone who could do that better than me. And with that, release myself for my next task. So I never looked at my title as something that I own or a project that I need for a while. And maybe that's why I'm not so much attached to power. Actually, I never liked the word power. It sounds like you have commission. For me, I used the word responsibility instead. With the task, you get a responsibility. And your responsibility is to lead tough change and get people inspired about a better future. It is about shaping the future, not becoming victims of it. And it is about handing over the responsibility so that you can take on your next project. Now, what is my next project? I don't know. Lost World is probably an element of it. So companies that have the right idea and needs dramatic scale. I don't know exactly what my role will be because, you know, as you said, I'm always looking for projects, which means they are dynamic over time. But I do know that I am going to spend most of my leadership capacity, so my business leadership capacity on accelerating the decarbonization of the world. And I think I'm going to spend most of my personal capacity on being more human and more present in relationships that matter. Wonderful. That's really wonderful. I'm shaping the future and not being the victim of it, I think is a very, very good concept. I feel very honored that you took time talking to me today. And yeah, and I wish you a lot of energy and good health to continue setting a positive example. Thank you very much, Simsnabel. Thank you. 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