Wolf Schneider remembers how he wrote a book about Gruner + Jahr at the end of the nineties, on behalf of the publisher, and how he previously warned the CEO that it would be at most 51 percent positive. His answer: He would have preferred 52 percent, but then he would want to be liberal.
Peter-Matthias Gaede remembers how a food company canceled ads in the double-digit millions because of an article. “The chairman was enjoying himself. He leafed through the story again, bursting out laughing: ‘If we can no longer afford such stories, business is no longer fun.'”
If someone dies, this is always the day of anecdotes about him. One point of fate is that Gerd Schulte-Hillen died on Wednesday of all days, at the age of 80: The man who really made Gruner + Jahr great dies a day and a half before the announcement that his publisher will now be short and is made small. Wolf Schneider, now 96, headed the publishing house’s journalism school for a long time. Peter-Matthias Gaede, now 70, was editor-in-chief of Geo chairman Schulte-Hillen as boss. And when you talk to one of them (and a few others) on the phone and read what the other is now writing on the publisher’s website, it is noticeable that everyone can only think of the finest.
Instead of juice there was water in the editorial offices, after all he wanted to invest
In 1981 Schulte-Hillen became CEO, and Schneider said that the newcomer had informed the editors that the standard drink in the refrigerator would no longer be juice, but water. Schneider thinks it positive: Schulte-Hillen saved where he could save to invest where he could invest. He had studied mechanical engineering in Aachen, then started as an assistant to Bertelsmann owner Reinhard Mohn; In the seventies he built, renovated and bought printing works for him before Mohn offered him the management of the subsidiary Gruner + Jahr. “A good printer,” reports Gaede, is said to have been said by a great man in the Hamburg media world about his new colleague; it was meant explicitly derogatory. The blasphemer should be surprised. At that time, Gruner + Jahr had 13 sheets in Germany and eight abroad. When Schulte-Hillen left the company in 2000 – at the age of 60, as was common in the Bertelsmann Group at the time – there were 34 in Germany and 50 abroad. He had increased the profit tenfold. Gruner + Jahr, or what is left of it, owes its golden era to him.
Gerd Schulte-Hillen was a member of the Bertelsmann-Reich supervisory board for a few years, then fell out with the Mohns for a while and opened a small management consultancy until he hadn’t felt so well for a few years. Wolf Schneider also says: “He was probably the most pleasant among the able, and the most efficient among the pleasant.”