Silence, FOMO & the Imperfect Engineer: How Jan Brockmann Runs Hot & Keeps His Cool

There are many ways to leave a company. Jan Brockmann knows one of the hardest: You leave without an answer.

Years later, he is sitting across from me at the Pullman in Delhi’s Aerocity. Outside, Delhi is humid and restless. Aircraft descend towards the airport every few minutes. Inside, the air-conditioning has erased most reminders of the weather.

Brockmann looks exactly like the kind of man you might expect to run a German engineering business. Navy suit. Open-collared white shirt. A notebook beside him. Composed. Precise. Almost economical in his movements.

There is none of the CEO hurry. He listens to the end of a question. Holds eye contact. Answers. Sometimes smiles. Sometimes laughs. And sometimes doesn’t. That last bit becomes interesting when we begin talking about failure. Brockmann can tell you about mistakes. He can tell you about the time he chased a booming market, went “full pedal”, spent money, built capacity and watched the market turn. He can admit to FOMO. He can even laugh about it. But some scars are easier to talk about than others.

I asked Brockmann about the hardest feedback he had ever received. For a moment, the room seemed to become quieter.

“The hardest feedback is always no feedback.”

Then he went somewhere I hadn’t expected him to go: Volkswagen. Brockmann had spent years at the German automobile giant. He had risen through its ranks, worked across businesses and geographies.

Then came the exit. Why? He knows. He isn’t telling me. “I know the reasons,” he says, before making it clear that he doesn’t want to discuss them.

And there it is again. Silence. Except now it isn’t the silence in a hotel room in Delhi. It is an older one.

Brockmann talks about a culture where feedback wasn’t always forthcoming. When nobody tells you what went wrong, there is no uncomfortable conversation to replay. No verdict to accept or reject. No explanation against which you can argue your own case. There is only the story you construct yourself.

“You have to build your own story around.”

A beat.

“That is hard.”

For a few seconds, the man who makes decisions for a living is talking about what happens when somebody else makes one about you. And doesn’t explain it.

That is the thing about silence. It leaves plenty of room for stories. Some you tell others. Some you tell yourself. And some, perhaps, you never quite finish.

Brockmann is 59 now. He has worked with the French, Swedes and Germans. He has moved from cars to refrigerators, from heating to cooling, from Volkswagen to Electrolux to Bosch. He has run businesses, factories and transformations. Today, he leads Bosch Home Comfort, a sprawling global business that has just swallowed the biggest acquisition in Bosch’s history.

Ask him how he would describe himself and two words arrive quickly.

“Cool and decisive.”

The first is easy to believe.

Across our conversation, Brockmann rarely rushes an answer. He smiles often, occasionally laughs at himself and seems comfortable enough with his scars to point at a few of them. The second word is where things become interesting: Decisive. Because Jan Brockmann loves decisions. He really loves them.

Much later, when I ask what part of being a CEO he secretly enjoys most, there is no grand speech about creating impact, inspiring people or changing the world.

“I love to make decisions,” he says. “That’s what I love most.”

This makes what happened in 2023 rather inconvenient. Europe was in turmoil. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had scrambled the continent’s assumptions about energy. Gas had become a geopolitical anxiety. Governments were pushing electrification. Heat pumps were suddenly hot. Very hot. Demand surged. Competitors chased market share. Factories expanded. Production lines stretched. Components were bought. Capacity went up. Everybody could see the opportunity. So could Brockmann. And he ran with it. Full pedal.

Then the market turned. Demand collapsed. Inventory remained. Capacity remained. People remained. The money had already been spent. The CEO who loves making decisions had made one he would later wish he hadn’t.

Brockmann doesn’t hide behind geopolitics. He doesn’t blame policymakers. He doesn’t reach for that wonderfully elastic piece of corporate vocabulary: market conditions changed. He gives me something far more useful.

“I made the error to go with the flow.”

I couldn’t resist.

“So, CEOs have FOMO too?”

Brockmann laughs.

“Sure, sure.”

There it was. The global CEO, the German engineer, the man who prefers data because instinct can lead to too many errors, caught by something gloriously, embarrassingly human: the fear that everybody else might be getting ahead.

And suddenly those two words Brockmann had used to describe himself sounded far more interesting. Cool. And decisive. Because keeping your cool when the whole market is running hot is one thing; knowing when not to run with it is another.

THE IMPERFECT ENGINEER

There is a problem with interviewing German engineers. Or at least I tell Brockmann there is.

Engineers, I suggest, have a reputation for being rational creatures. Numbers. Systems. Specifications. Efficiency. Everything neatly measurable. Emotion tends to struggle for space on the spreadsheet.

Brockmann doesn't mount a spirited defence of his tribe. Instead, he gives me a better line.

“I’m not the perfect engineer.”

He smiles. The more Brockmann talks, the clearer it becomes that the engineer in him is interested in something engineering alone cannot solve: People. Or, more specifically, what makes people want things.

When I ask him whether I am sitting across from an engineer who became a CEO or a CEO whose heart still beats like an engineer, he makes a small correction.

“You’re talking to a CEO with a technical background.”

Fair enough. So, what does make his heart beat?

“Products.”

The answer takes us back to Hamburg.

Long before refrigerators, heat pumps, air conditioners and billion-euro acquisitions entered his life, there were aeroplanes. Brockmann grew up fascinated by flying. Airbus Commercial Aircraft was headquartered in Hamburg, and aircraft coming in to land were difficult for a young engineering mind to ignore. He went on to study aeronautical engineering and eventually landed an internship at Airbus.

Decades later, what seems to have survived most vividly isn't a formula or an engineering principle. It is the machine. The aircraft. The four engines.

“I love the product.”

That fascination would become a recurring theme in his career even as the products kept changing. Aeroplanes gave way to automobiles. Automobiles to consumer appliances. Refrigerators eventually gave way to heating systems and air conditioners.

The engineer kept moving. The product obsession stayed. But somewhere along the way Brockmann realised that building a technically brilliant product is only half the game. Somebody has to want it. Somebody has to understand it. And, rather inconveniently for engineers, somebody has to be willing to pay for it.

That is the territory where Brockmann seems most comfortable: the messy intersection between what engineers can build and what consumers will buy. He talks about understanding consumer needs, converting those needs into technical specifications and then bringing economics into the equation. What will the consumer value? What will the consumer pay for? How much technology is enough?

It is why his description of himself as an “imperfect engineer” feels less like self-deprecation and more like a clue. Perhaps perfection was never particularly useful for the career Brockmann was going to have. He needed to understand the machine. But he also needed to understand the person standing in front of it. And those people, unlike machines, don't always behave according to specification. Neither, as Brockmann had already discovered, do markets.

HOW LONG IS TOO LONG?

There is another thing Brockmann has learnt not to trust completely: Familiarity.

By the time he was at Electrolux, he had spent years inside large global organisations. Long enough to understand their rhythms. Long enough to know where the levers were. Long enough, eventually, to ask himself an uncomfortable question.

“Am I still... am I not blind?”

It is an odd fear for someone whose job depends on seeing things before others do. Brockmann reckons there comes a point when longevity can begin working against a leader. You know the organisation. You know the people. You know how things get done.

Perhaps too well. Eight years, he suggests, is a reasonable point at which to start asking yourself whether you still bring the same energy, whether you can still see what needs changing, whether experience has quietly turned into familiarity and familiarity into blindness.

Brockmann eventually spent about a decade at Electrolux. Then he moved again. The CV version of what followed is easy enough to write: Volkswagen had given him automobiles; Electrolux gave him consumer appliances; Bosch Home Comfort would give him heating and cooling.

Brockmann sees something else connecting them. All three are European companies with global ambitions. All have had to operate across markets and cultures. All have wrestled, in different ways, with the tension between scale and identity: common platforms and backend efficiencies on one side, brands and consumers on the other.

But Bosch presented him with a particularly delicious engineering problem. A business built around heat needed to get much better at cooling. And the future of that cooling expertise increasingly lay thousands of kilometres away from Europe. In Asia.

WHEN HEATING MET COOLING

The numbers make Brockmann’s problem wonderfully simple. Cooling, he says, is 15 to 20 times bigger than heating.

For a business historically weighted towards heating, that is less a statistic than a flashing signpost. Brockmann believes the two worlds are converging. Europe has to electrify heating and move towards heat pumps. But if Bosch Home Comfort wants to become truly global, it cannot remain a European heating company looking out at a world increasingly hungry for cooling.

And there was another uncomfortable reality. Much of the expertise for that future would no longer come from where European companies were accustomed to finding it. “The technology and the products will come more from Asian cooling experts than from European heating experts,” he says.

So, Bosch went shopping. In 2025, it completed the €7.4-billion acquisition of Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning, the largest acquisition in Bosch’s history. There were several strategic reasons for the deal: global scale, stronger brands, diversification and a much larger footprint in Asian HVAC.

But strip away the deal language and Brockmann’s logic is remarkably straightforward. If the future is increasingly about cooling, go where the cooling expertise is. Which eventually brings him to India.

“We want to win and grow.”

THE €7.4-BILLION BET MEETS THE INDIAN SHOPPER

Brockmann doesn't decorate the ambition. India is already among Bosch Home Comfort’s top eight markets globally. He wants it among the top three by 2030. That sounds like the sort of target CEOs announce from conference rooms. Brockmann went to a store.

“That's one of the reasons why we went to retail,” he tells me. “Because I wanted to see.”

See what? How India buys. For someone who has spent a career thinking about products, the Indian air-conditioner store presents an interesting little puzzle.

In much of Europe, Brockmann explains, residential heating and cooling products move through professional channels. An installer understands the equipment, knows the brands and often plays an important role in deciding what finally enters a home.

India brings the consumer much closer to the machine. Walk into an electrical retailer and the competition is staring back at you. Brands. Features. Specifications. Technologies. Price tags. A first-time buyer may be choosing an air conditioner while simultaneously learning how to choose one.

Brockmann noticed the consequence.

“Here you need to explain more.”

Suddenly, all that technical communication crowding an Indian appliance store begins to make sense. The engineer may have built the machine. Now somebody has to explain the bloody thing. And before all of that comes something even more basic: Price.

“First they have to look for price.”

Brockmann knows Indian consumers are becoming more affluent. He also knows an air conditioner can remain a significant household purchase, particularly for someone buying one for the first time.

Then comes trust. The Hitachi acquisition makes that equation particularly interesting. Brockmann describes Hitachi as a “mass premium” brand. Bosch brings another identity. He intends to play both rather than force them into one. A dual-brand strategy. Different positions. Different stories.

And Brockmann believes Bosch itself needs to become more aggressive about telling its story in India. The imperfect engineer, it turns out, spends a surprising amount of time thinking about storytelling. Which brings us to another contradiction. For all the technology Brockmann wants to sell, he has little patience for innovation that ordinary people cannot afford.

“The masses make the difference.”

THE MASS & THE CLASS ACT

It is probably the least glamorous sustainability philosophy a global CEO could offer. Which is why it works.

Brockmann’s argument is brutally practical. A sustainable product available only to wealthy consumers may be technologically impressive. Its ability to change the world remains limited.

“If only the rich people can afford sustainable products, we don't make a difference.”

For Brockmann, ecological value has to coexist with economic and social value. He learnt that lesson long before Bosch. At Electrolux, he was involved in driving what he describes as the first factories in the US using fluoro-free refrigerant and foam. The environmental gain mattered. So did the economics. That combination seems fundamental to the way Brockmann thinks. He isn't particularly interested in sustainability as virtue signalling. The innovation has to work. The consumer has to want it. The economics have to survive. Otherwise, scale never arrives.

And without scale, the masses never do either. There is a neat loop here back to the young man watching Airbus aircraft descend into Hamburg. The machines have become different. The questions have become harder. What should we build? What will people buy? What can they afford? When should we invest? When should we wait? And perhaps most dangerously: When does conviction become FOMO?

Brockmann has spent a career trying to answer questions like these. Age has given him one rather unexpected weapon. Sometimes, he simply ignores them. Or at least the email.

THE EMAIL JAN BROCKMANN WILL NEVER ANSWER

Brockmann has a little matrix in his head. Two axes: Important and urgent. Young managers, he reckons, have a tendency to push everything towards the same corner. Important. Urgent. An email arrives, answer it. A request lands, deal with it. Something appears in the inbox. Move.

Brockmann used to be more like that. Age has changed the matrix. Some things are important and urgent. Do them. Some are important but can wait. Some are urgent without being particularly important. And then there is the glorious fourth box. Neither important nor urgent.

What does Jan Brockmann do with those? “You don't even reply to anything, never, not even later.”

There is a flicker of mischief in the philosophy.

“I consider this a strength.”

For a man who has just told me that he loves products, growth and decisions, the idea that doing nothing can be a strength feels almost subversive. But it runs deeper than email etiquette. One of the things Brockmann would tell his younger self today is to have more patience: Wait sometimes and allow things the chance to change on their own.

It is a curious lesson for someone whose professional identity has been built around intervention. Managers fix. Engineers solve. CEOs decide. Brockmann has spent decades doing all three. Perhaps experience is also learning that every problem does not improve simply because the person at the top has touched it.

And that takes us back, inevitably, to 2023. Everybody moved. Brockmann moved with them. Now he can see the alternative that was available to him all along: Wait. Lose some market share if necessary. Let the cycle play itself out. Do nothing. For the man who loves making decisions, that may be the decision that took longest to learn.

PLAYING THE PIANO

There are other things engineering school doesn't teach you. How to be German with the French. Swedish with the Germans. Or occasionally, Brockmann suggests, a little bit of everything.

After decades inside multinational companies, he has developed his own cultural keyboard.

“I can play a little bit the piano.”

The metaphor makes him smile. Brockmann has worked extensively with French, Swedish and German organisations, and each has left something behind. German directness has its uses. Swedish management can be softer, more consensus-driven. Other situations demand another register entirely. The trick, he has discovered, isn't choosing one style and declaring it authentic leadership. It is knowing which key to press.

Sometimes he deliberately plays with the expectations people bring into a room. If they expect the German to be direct, he can be direct. If the moment requires something softer, he can reach for that too.

It is an unexpectedly playful admission from a man who describes himself as “cool and decisive”. But Brockmann has spent enough time running global businesses to understand that organisations aren't machines. Push the same button in two countries and you don't necessarily get the same response. People require translation too. Perhaps that explains another Brockmann line that initially sounds like something destined for a management conference.

“Leadership is marketing.”

He doesn't mean personal branding. He means repetition. A leader may have a perfectly clear picture of where an organisation is headed. That clarity is useless if thousands of people don't share it. So, you say it. Then say it again. And again. The vision, the mission, and the direction. People, Brockmann says, need the “emotional safety” of knowing that the organisation isn't going to suddenly abandon the road it has asked them to travel.

The phrase is striking coming from the man who earlier told me what no feedback feels like. He doesn't connect the two. Neither will I. But they sit rather interestingly beside each other. At Volkswagen, Brockmann remembers what it was like when communication disappeared and he had to build his own story around the silence.

Years later, as a CEO, he talks about the responsibility to communicate repeatedly enough that people know where they stand. Sometimes, the most interesting things in an interview are the connections the protagonist never makes for you.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

Communication becomes harder as organisations become larger. So does proximity. Brockmann knows one of the occupational hazards of his job is distance. A global CEO can become a face on a screen, a name on an email, somebody employees know largely through decisions travelling down an organisation. He doesn't want that.

But there is another kind of distance he cannot entirely eliminate. The distance created by the job itself.

I ask him whether it gets lonely at the top.

“It is lonely.”

There is no heroic denial or obligatory line about the wonderful team surrounding him. Just an acknowledgement. Brockmann has people he can speak to. People whose views he values. A life outside the company matters too because decisions need somewhere to be bounced around, somewhere beyond the echo chamber of the organisation. But advice has a boundary.

“You have to make decisions that not everyone can support, and that makes you lonely.” There is another boundary too. “You cannot build relations that would be in the way of uncomfortable decisions.”

Read that again. For all the talk about empathy, communication and emotional safety, Brockmann understands the brutal little clause hidden inside the CEO contract. You can listen. You can consult. You can build relationships. You can care. But you cannot become so attached to those relationships that they prevent you from making the call the job demands.

One day the uncomfortable decision may involve somebody you know. Somebody you like. Somebody who trusted you. And the title doesn't allow friendship to cast the deciding vote. Perhaps that is where “cool and decisive” becomes less personality description and more occupational necessity. Cool enough to listen and decisive enough to eventually stop listening. Because at some point, the meeting ends. The advisers leave. The presentations close. The recommendations have been heard. And somebody still has to decide.

THE LAST QUESTION

We have been talking for close to 90 minutes about aircraft, refrigerators, heat pumps, air conditioners, France, Sweden, Germany and India, consumers, sustainability, FOMO.

What about mistakes. Many of them?

“Yes, many.” And decisions. Thousands of them, presumably. Some worked. At least one spectacularly didn't.

So, I saved one question for the end.

“What part of being CEO do you secretly enjoy the most?”

There are plenty of safe answers available. Building teams. Creating products. Transforming companies. Seeing people grow. Making an impact. Brockmann chooses none of them.

“I love to make decisions.”

Then, almost as if the first sentence hasn't made the point strongly enough: “That’s what I love most.”

And there he is. Jan Brockmann. The imperfect engineer who prefers data because instinct can produce too many errors. The CEO who once followed everybody else into a booming market and watched it turn. The older manager who has learnt that some emails deserve no reply and some problems deserve time rather than intervention. The leader who says decisions can make you lonely. And the man who still loves making them. Maybe perfection was never the point. Brockmann told me that near the beginning.

“I’m not the perfect engineer.”

He doesn't appear to be chasing the perfect CEO either. He runs hot. He gets things wrong. He waits longer now. And, mostly, he keeps his cool.

But when the noise dies down, the data has been studied, everyone has had their say and the final call reaches his desk, there is still one part of the Brockmann wants for himself: The decision.