He reached retirement age many years ago. But he wasn't interested. "An entrepreneur remains an entrepreneur, until the bitter end," says Dietmar Harting. Even the 50 years of service he recorded in 2017 gave no reason to stop. Now the senior manager at the helm of the HARTING Technology Group a very special event to celebrate: his golden jubilee “plus”. With 55 years of hard work behind him, he beats all other employees of the family business with a long track record.
Dr. Michael Pütz (r.), Member of the Board for Human Resources and Legal Affairs at the HARTING Technology Group, and Margrit Harting congratulate senior manager Dietmar Harting on his golden service milestone “plus”.
It is truly an era in which this German SME has risen to become an international technology titan. And no one has made a greater mark or done more strategically or technologically to drive this era than Dietmar Harting, who took over responsibility for the company in 1967 after completing his business studies, initially together with his mother, later with his brother (who died at a young age), and since 1987 with his wife Margrit. With barely 1,000 employees and an annual turnover of 29 million marks, HARTING at that time one of the smaller players in the technology sector. More than ten years after joining, Dietmar Harting made the decision to expand internationally (“to this day my most important decision”) and began a journey that set the course for a leading position in the most important world markets. The first foreign subsidiary was founded in France in 1979.
When he handed over operational responsibility to his son Philip (CEO) and Maresa Harting-Hertz (Finance, Purchasing and Facility Management Director) in 2015, HARTING already a leader in the industry. Dietmar Harting naturally did not give up. His permanent workplace remains his office at the company's headquarters in Espelkamp. He did not even spend the day of his special anniversary at home in his armchair. He is very interested and reads everything that has to do with the industry, developments in technology and the standards system, and he is rarely inclined to put his reading aside - except for a game of Scrabble with his wife Margrit. Even that is played with passion. And so he has not only steered the course of his own company, but also the work and development of international standardization organizations, technology and business associations, in positions such as Chairman of the Deutsches Institut für Normung eV (DIN), at the Zentralverband Elektrotechnik- und Elektronikindustrie eV (ZVEI), as Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Messe AG, and as a member of the technology and research councils established by Chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. For his extraordinary commitment, he has been awarded, among other things, the German Federal Merit Cross 1st Class, an honorary doctorate from the Leibniz University of Hannover and the Erich Gutenberg Prize.
The city of Espelkamp made him an honorary citizen. At the company's headquarters, it was Dietmar Harting, once active in the local handball association, supporter of sports clubs and teams, who financed the construction and modernization of sports facilities. In this way, this entrepreneur has combined cosmopolitan entrepreneurship with an active involvement in his home base for decades.
Nederlands