A Portrait of Carsten Coesfeld

At its meeting today, Bertelsmann’s Supervisory Board appointed Carsten Coesfeld to the Group Executive Board as Chief Investments and Financial Solutions Officer. Who is this 36-year-old who will become the new Bertelsmann Executive Board member on January 1, 2024? A portrait of Carsten Coesfeld.

Unleash Entrepreneurial Power

On January 1, 2024, Carsten Coesfeld will take a seat on the Executive Board of the global Bertelsmann Group. He will be responsible for Investments and Financial Solutions, a new Executive Board department. The 36-year-old, who sees himself as a full-blooded entrepreneur, considers it both an honor and a challenge that the Supervisory Board has appointed him to the Executive Board.

Carsten Coesfeld’s career at Bertelsmann began in 2011 after studying business administration at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management and the London School of Economics, and his first position in the private equity fund business at Goldman Sachs in London. Coesfeld, who grew up and went to school in Gütersloh, then left London and returned to his hometown to become assistant to the Chairman & CEO of Bertelsmann. The following year, he moved to the leading international trade publishing group Penguin Random House in New York, where he took on various roles in Business Development and Strategy.

Partnership as a matter of principle

This was followed by positions at Arvato Financial Solutions, now the financial services provider Riverty, where Coesfeld was a member of the management team at BFS Health Finance and built up the billing business for hospitals. “At the time, it was a start-up within a large company,” Coesfeld recalls. At the beginning of 2016, Coesfeld became President Telecommunications and Managing Director at Arvato Supply Chain Solutions. He transformed the business area, achieving growth of 20 percent – primarily by entering into sustainable partnerships with leading, high-growth tech companies such as Amazon.

All necessary structural changes were made in partnership and together with the works councils, a basic principle that Coesfeld considers essential. It is important to him to develop the business together with a complete team. In March 2020, he returned to Penguin Random House, this time in London. There, Carsten Coesfeld became CEO of the global non-fiction publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK). He completely restructured the historic English publisher, intensified collaborations with fellow PRH imprints, and systematically focused DK on the online business. With success: “Together, we have positioned the historic English imprint for the digital age. In 2021, we were able to pay every employee a special bonus for the best year in the company’s history.”

At DK, he also learned to give creative people, such as authors, the freedom and security to develop while helping them to reach more readers with their content. Publishing highlights during Coesfeld’s time at DK included the publisher’s first “New York Times” bestseller, “Texture over Taste” by Joshua Weissman, and the book celebrating Queen Elisabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, which every British schoolchild received from the Department for Education.

Retaining founders around the world

In June 2022, Coesfeld was appointed as CEO of the Bertelsmann Investments (BI) division and became a member of Bertelsmann’s Group Management Committee (GMC). As CEO of BI, he has since been responsible for the Group’s global fund network with its current 370 direct and indirect active investments, and at the same time for the Bertelsmann Next unit dedicated to developing new growth areas and lines of business. “Bertelsmann Investments is very global, with its investment teams in New York, New Delhi and Beijing, as well as our digital health activities in the U.S. I learn a lot about the world on my travels. We seek to retain successful entrepreneurs and founders around the world for Bertelsmann. It’s a very fulfilling task.”

In April 2023, Carsten Coesfeld was also appointed to the Board of Directors of RTL Group.

In addition to the Bertelsmann stations, Coesfeld is keen to build deeper relationships with the U.S. in particular. He took part in the Atlantic Bridge’s Young Leaders Program and is a Finance Leadership Fellow at the renowned Aspen Institute.

Carsten Coesfeld’s intensive professional travel activities mean that he likes to spend his free time with his wife and his two-year-old daughter at home in Gütersloh.

Four beliefs as CEO

When asked about his definition of a CEO, he replies: “Over the past eleven years as a manager, I’ve developed the following beliefs: First, the entrepreneurial freedom and creative opportunities we give our employees unleash the greatest motivational power. Secondly, it is extremely important to create a safe environment. Our colleagues must have the confidence to express their opinions clearly; only then can we reach the best possible decision for the company. Third, it is perfectly okay to make mistakes. In fact, we want to, because it’s part of entrepreneurship. You just have to be honest with yourself, recognize the mistakes, and correct them promptly. And fourth, we can only be successful as a team. Ideally, team members will bring complementary strengths to the table. Successes must be celebrated together, and we must stand together in the face of setbacks.” He sees his own task as setting the right framework for this, and implements this at Bertelsmann Investments with his vision of “Empowering entrepreneurs all around the world.”

“Bertelsmann is the company of entrepreneurs”

And it is this entrepreneurial attitude that Coesfeld will bring with him when he joins the Executive Board on January 1. He knows that he is fully in line with Bertelsmann’s corporate culture: “Creativity and entrepreneurship are not only Bertelsmann’s core values, they are also guiding principles for me personally. Bertelsmann is the company of entrepreneurs, and I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur.” Time and again, he says, he is both impressed and inspired by the creative and entrepreneurial powerhouse that is Bertelsmann.