Context:
Robert Bosch RK GM program was a leadership development program focusing on expanding leaders’ views on trends, knowledge of markets and competition. One of the key elements is understanding business in China and growth in the global market environment. Robert Bosch Kellog collaborated with Duke Kunshan University and brought their general managers from various regions to China. They have experienced the entrepreneurial spirit, Chinese innovation and how the culture impacts their way of leading in the globalized world.
Challenges:
As a German multinational engineering and technology company, Robert Bosch was founded by Robert Bosch in 1886. It’s one of the world leading companies in Mobility Solutions, Industrial Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology. Bosch understood that old habits and traditions, often die young in an ever changing fast paced environment. Trying to adapt to the German perfectionism, required the company’s products to be perfect even before hitting the market. But Bosch soon found out that, in a fast changing world, flaw wasn’t failure and innovation was key.
Custom Approach:
We worked closely with colleagues at Robert Bosch Kolleg, and designed a five-day development experience, in order to help leaders become more agile, entrepreneurial, insightful, and creative in their roles at Bosch world-wide. The program was set in China and provided them with rich, first-hand experience with its economy, people and system of government. China’s unique context, which was generally quite different from their own operating environment, practiced and reflected on the observational skills, creativity, and self-awareness, that they needed.
The program consisted of a series of lectures, discussions, visits, and meetings. The lectures provided participants with important background information about China and several useful frameworks that they could use to make a sudden impact. We also conducted extensive de-briefing sessions when they were asked to share their observations and hypotheses, or explanations for what they saw and heard. In these discussions, they focused critically on the “taken-for-granted” assumptions they often hold about the way the world works. This helped broadened the range of issues and situations they prepared to handle and familiarized themselves with the mind-set they needed to maintain, in order to develop creative and holistic solutions to the opportunities and challenges they were facing in their roles at Bosch.
