Pilz Way: Running Company like Home
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
These days, Renate Pilz is excited that her two-year-old grandson Peter is moving closer to her. Peter used to live two hours away from her home in southern Germany, but soon he will move to Stuttgart which is just 20 minutes away from his grandma.
``It's a wonderful experience to have a grandchild. It changes your life,'' she says with her mellifluous voice during her stay in Seoul last week.
Like many other women of her age, Pilz likes to garden, likes to listens to classical music such as Bach and Mozart and cannot wait to see her lovely grandson. But time is always a constraint to the 67-year-old. Other than the baby Peter, she has some 1,200 people to look after scattered all over the world _ employees of the company that her father-in-law established in 1948.
Pilz is in fact the president and CEO of Pilz, an industrial safety equipment maker headquartered in Ostfildern, Germany. Her case epitomizes how good management philosophy and focused R&D can grow a small local enterprise into a global market leader, while keeping its identity as a family-oriented, family-owned and family-managed business.
Before 1975 she was just a ``happy, and always thankful'' housewife who had sought the meaning of her life within her family. But that year her husband Peter died in a tragic plane accident, leaving her with then seven-year-old son Thomas and four-year-old daughter Susanne. So for the next 20 years, she served as a chairwoman of the advising board. And after her children finished schooling in 1995, she decided to run the company by herself.
``I thought there were many chances in the company and I want to bring a life to them,'' she explained why she made the decision of becoming the CEO 12 years ago. ``I had many things to create and many opportunities to develop. It was a good decision for me, and I hope it was also good for the company,'' she said, with a broad smile.
The company indeed had a good time under her command. Though it is not a major conglomerate, Pilz has showed a steady and healthy growth and built up a solid reputation in the factory safety field _ equipments that keeps line workers safe from industrial accidents by sensing and analyzing motions of the workers and the machineries.
The number of employees has grown from 400 to 1,200 over the years and its global subsidiaries expanded from seven to 24 covering all five continents, including one in Seoul. These days, more than 60 percent of its revenues are generated from outside Germany.
The name Pilz also helped her. It means mushroom in German, so customers remember the firm as the maker of ``mushroom button'' _ one of its early products _ both literally and figuratively.
As a woman who unexpectedly succeeded her husband, lady Pilz' life somewhat resembles that of Jang Young-shin, chairwoman of South Korea's Aekyung Group. Jang too was a 36-year-old housewife when she inherited the firm following her husband's sudden death in 1970. They both had become respected businesswomen and CEOs. And they both are planning to hand over their businesses to the next generation.
Pilz, however, has a differing management philosophy. Jang has utilized stock offerings, mergers and acquisitions to make Aekyung a conglomerate with 2 trillion won of annual sales. But Pilz has always remained as a strictly family-owned business of 200 billion won of sales, even though the family could have made a large fortune if they have wanted to list the company on the stock market.
``We grow on our own power. We want to go independent,'' she said. And she says that she wants the firm to be a team that has a family-like bond and shares the same ideal of making the world safer and better place.
Such a corporate philosophy is widespread within the company and an evidence can be found in its Seoul office. The building has a tranquil view of Mt. Namsan to its south. But local manager Hakan Borin uses a dark room facing west, while the rest of his staff shares the view of the mountain from the sunny southern side.
``Everyone should be able to enjoy the good view,'' he said.