Gerrard Schmid, CEO of Diebold Nixdorf, Shares the Highs and Lows of Being a CEO

Gerrard Schmid is a global executive recognized for executing broad transformations, building deep leadership teams, accelerating growth and innovation, and managing risk and change. With rich experience in technology across large-cap and mid-cap companies globally, he is a business focused executive that has held the roles of CEO, COO, advisor and Board member.

Gerrard Schmid was appointed CEO of Diebold Nixdorf two years ago in early 2018. But already, he has made important changes for the company and has bigger plans for the future. In an interview with Business Today, Schmid shared some of those goals and how he hopes to accomplish them.

Business Today (Rhea Park): Congratulations on your role as CEO at Diebold Nixdorf! Can you tell us how being a CEO is different from any other jobs you might have? 

Gerrard Schmid (GS):This is my 8th year as a public company CEO. It's a profound shift. I worked up through various roles in life, and I thought that I was prepared for the transition to CEO. I quickly realized that there were a number of skills and behaviors that I underestimated. One thing I underestimated was just how lonely the role is. It is a very lonely role. And therefore, you need to be comfortable with that reality. Some people are, some people aren't. But it's probably one of the less well understood aspects of it all. 

BT: How has being the CEO of Diebold Nixdorf been different than your experience being the CEO of other companies?

GS: Well every company is different, that's the one thing I think is universally true. Diebold Nixdorf has got a very long history. It's been around 150 years. We're the world's largest producer of ATMs - there's three million ATMs on the planet and almost 1.2 million are Diebold Nixdorf machines. So if you've ever taken cash out of an ATM machine, there's an extremely high probability that you've interacted with our company. My experience at Diebold Nixdorf has been different though, because the company that I joined had all sorts of issues. So, I'm dealing with a restructuring situation. That means I have to make some difficult decisions on areas we want to invest in, areas we want to de-invest in, and markets we want to be in. Therefore, it's a classic restructuring situation where we've been focused on first saving the company and now building it out.

BT: What about your next steps for Diebold Nixdorf?

GS: In my first 12 months at the company, the single most important thing I needed to change was to prove the company's ability to generate sufficient cash. We were burning more cash than we were generating. Therefore, the sustainability of the company was in question. Our team has done a fabulous job, and that is no longer my core goal because that's now been done. What we're trying to do now is take a company that's involved in 130 different countries and globalize it as much as possible. 

BT: How do you plan to go about globalizing your company?

GS: We need to cover common ways of thinking, go to market strategies, and common ways of pricing and dealing with customers, while also respecting true local market differences. That also plays into culture. When you've been in a company where local market practices have been the dominant culture, to shift that to one where you're looking for commonalities across countries and across markets takes a lot of time and a lot of focus. 

BT: Those seem like very ambitious economic goals. Is there anything you hope to change internally within the company with regards to culture? 

GS: We're also focusing on shifting the diversity mix of our leadership team. We have a leadership structure that is diverse in the nationalities of our leadership, but we have a way to go in gender diversity, so that's the next change we need to focus on.