Within three years, Hapag-Lloyd has developed into the digital, agile and, according to “Handelsblatt”, most profitable container carrier in the world. Ralf Belusa is jointly responsible for this. What he set up as CDO at the traditional Hamburg shipping company is an example of transformation at its best.
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You started at Hapag-Lloyd in 2017. What attracted you to the company?
RALF BELUSA: Hapag-Lloyd approaches digitization and transformation differently than many others. For them, the transformation is not just a strategic matter, nor is it pure IT – if you only do digitization from IT, then it’s just a game of technology. But digitization is so much more: It’s about people, about marketing, about sales. About how we talk to each other and how we can work together. Technology is just an enabling and aid. At Hapag-Lloyd, I can make a difference, because transformation is not a strategy issue there, but also includes sales and marketing.
Are you not only Chief Digital Officer, but are you also responsible for digital marketing, digital sales and digital product development? How is that possible?
This allows me to make a completely different impact. We build digital products, for which we then do the marketing right away and empower our sales colleagues. It sounds totally logical that sales can sell the products that have just been built. But in many companies this still happens far too rarely. It often works like this: You have a new feature, a new service, a new, great thing. But sales are not quite ready because they are working on another big customer. And marketing is currently preparing the Easter or Christmas campaign. You know these strange conversations. True to the motto: Nice to wave to you!
And does this interaction work better at Hapag-Lloyd now?
I try to bring everything together at Hapag-Lloyd. Also with the help of management frameworks, more precisely with Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs for short, which are always set up for 90 days. This is a different type of KPI that provides different targets. The OKRs make it possible to say: “I have the following good product for the customer that brings us more and brings more to the customer. Our goal is to get this product on the market in the next four weeks, educate customers about it, and get more business. ” And this is exactly the goal of marketing and sales in all countries and regions.
Did you find lots of open people at Hapag-Lloyd who were dying to work with OKRs, Scrum and the like?
Clearly: no. Of course, there is always a certain proportion of people who are open and positive – they also say “yes” to something when it’s the biggest crap, because they just want something new. And then there is the other extreme: the rather very negative, very destructive. And then there is the mass in between. The difficult thing about change management is to take away people’s fear of the unknown. You have to talk to people a lot.
Sometimes it also helps not to call things by their bad names. So you don’t have to call things Artificial Intelligence or Scrum or something. Because if you are not at all familiar with this topic and hear such words all the time, then you do not feel any more comfortable. You don’t need to repeat the foreign word 20 times. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any better. Some don’t like it the 20th time any more than the first time. That’s why it’s sometimes called differently. That was the case with us, for example, when we introduced agile working methods. We just didn’t call them agile working methods.
Have the past three years been expensive for Hapag-Lloyd?
No. I started with three employees. We developed a first example, showed the success and the reason why the procedure made so much sense. Then we took the next step and always looked to see how many people were paying for themselves, what and whom we needed where, and whether it was worth going on. Actually like every entrepreneur does. So we gradually got more employees, new customers and even more business.
This is an excerpt from a detailed interview with Ralf Belusa in the November print edition of absatzwirtschaft. The magazine with the complete interview can be ordered here.
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