Reinhard Mohn, who died on Saturday aged 88, was one of Germany’s most important post-second world war industrial leaders. He turned Bertelsmann from a small family-owned German publisher into a global media group and held strong views on the organisation of companies, which he was not afraid of sharing publicly.

Although he had steadily handed over responsibility, Mohn left behind a privately-held group that includes RTL television, the Random House publishing business in New York and Gruner + Jahr in Germany. The group has annual revenues of more than €16bn and employs more than 100,000 people. Hartmut Ostrowski, Bertelsmann’s chief executive, described him as “a formative figure in German business history” who had “embraced his responsibility to society”.