Hermann Scholl | |
|---|---|
| Born | 21 June 1935 Stuttgart, Germany |
| Education | University of Stuttgart |
| Occupations | Engineer, business executive |
| Title | Chairman of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH |
| Term | 1993–2003 |
| Predecessor | Marcus Bierich |
| Successor | Franz Fehrenbach |
| Awards | Werner von Siemens Ring (2011) |
Hermann Scholl (born 21 June 1935) is a German electrical engineer and business executive. He spent fifty years at Robert Bosch GmbH, where he was chairman of the board of management from 1993 to 2003 and chairman of the supervisory board from 2003 to 2012. He has been honorary chairman of the Bosch Group since 2012.
Scholl started at Bosch in 1962 as a development engineer and from 1968 headed petrol injection development. As chief executive he launched a change programme in 1999 after warning that the company was losing market share over quality problems and missed delivery dates. He received the Werner von Siemens Ring in 2011.
Scholl was born in Stuttgart on 21 June 1935. He passed his Abitur at the Karls-Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1954 and then studied electrical engineering, specialising in communications engineering, at what was then the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, now the University of Stuttgart. He graduated in 1959. In 1961 he received a doctorate in engineering for a thesis in psychoacoustics. He stayed at his institute for another year as a research assistant and worked on the use of semiconductors in electronic circuits.
In 1962 Scholl joined the advanced engineering department for automotive equipment at Bosch. From the start he worked on electronic petrol injection, and Bosch's first electronically controlled system for passenger cars (Jetronic) went on sale in 1967. Scholl became head of development for petrol injection in 1968. The second-generation L-Jetronic, which used integrated circuits made by Bosch, was developed under his direction. From 1970 he was also in charge of developing and piloting automotive semiconductors at the new Bosch plant in Reutlingen, and in 1971 he became director of engineering for electrical and electronic engine equipment.
In 1975 Bosch took charge of a development project to build the electronics of an anti-lock braking system with digital circuits. The system went on sale in 1978. Scholl filed more than 50 patents in his own name.
He joined the executive management in 1973, became a deputy member of the board of management in 1975 and a full member in 1978. By 1993 he was the board member responsible for automotive equipment.
Scholl succeeded Marcus Bierich as chairman of the board of management in July 1993. Bierich's contract ran until mid-1994, and he had wanted Friedrich Schiefer, whom he had recruited from Allianz, to follow him. In 1993 Bierich cut employee benefits, and tens of thousands of Bosch workers demonstrated against the cuts. Hans L. Merkle, Bierich's predecessor and the lifelong head of Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG, then arranged Bierich's early departure and chose Scholl, who had worked for Bosch for 31 years. The Industrietreuhand holds the voting rights of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the majority owner of the company. Until Merkle's death in 2000 Scholl reported to him for an hour every week.
In an internal circular in 1999 Scholl warned that Bosch was missing delivery dates it had confirmed and was losing market share in several fields because of poor quality. At the end of that year he launched a programme called BeQIK, which stood for quality, innovation and customer orientation. He also brought in about 50 consultants from the Thomas Group to go through the company's processes department by department. Scholl said the aim was more initiative at every level of the company. Walter Bauer, the chairman of the general works council, doubted that such a change of culture could be ordered from the top.
During his tenure Bosch sold its telecommunications division and bought Rexroth from Mannesmann. The company also bought businesses in industrial and building technology. Scholl wanted Bosch to stay off the stock market. In 2001 he said that, as a listed company, Bosch could hardly have made its long-term investments in diesel technology.
Scholl also took part in public economic debates. In 1995 he said that Germany was losing its economic base for ideological reasons and named high wages, rigid working hours and strict environmental rules. In November 2002 he criticised the tax plans of the Social Democratic and Green federal government, including a higher tax on the private use of company cars. He said that if the laws were passed as planned, the governing parties would have committed "a kind of electoral fraud".
In 2003 Franz Fehrenbach succeeded Scholl as chairman of the board of management, and Scholl became chairman of the supervisory board of Robert Bosch GmbH. He had been a managing partner of Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG since 1995. He chaired both bodies for nine years. In 2009 Jörg Hofmann, an IG Metall official on the Bosch supervisory board, described the Industrietreuhand as a second centre of power outside co-determination. At that time the eleven-member body exercised the shareholder function, and Scholl set the tone in it.
In March 2012 Bosch announced that Scholl would retire on 30 June 2012 and that Fehrenbach would succeed him in both posts. He left after 50 years with Bosch and became honorary chairman of the Bosch Group. At Bosch he was known for being as strict with others as with himself, and staff were wary of his follow-up questions. In 2015 he still came to the office for a few hours each day.