The Art of Refusing to Be Corrected

An Autobiography in Steel and Sapphire

MB&F’s horological machines are not objects easily mistaken for anything else. They appear as spaceships, bulldogs, robots, sculptural dwellings, and engineered apparitions from some parallel history of watchmaking. One was inspired by the architects of the 1960s who built postmodern towers that were as much statement as structure. Another drew from the model airplanes Büsser assembled as a boy. A third carried traces of the rugged, cinematic world of Han Solo. The pieces originate in a deeply specific personal landscape, which is precisely what makes them impossible to replicate. Strip out the functional necessity of a mechanical timepiece, Büsser argues, and that is where art begins. The same paradigm shift occurred in architecture: once utility ceased to be the sole measure of value, entirely new structural possibilities emerged.

The latest chapter is HM12. It is a 35-centimeter transformer robot whose head doubles as a functioning wristwatch. When leaving the house, the wearer unclicks the head, threads it onto a strap, and fastens it to the wrist. Upon returning, the watch snaps back into its mechanical body. Büsser calls it the Guardian. It stands watch on a desk while its owner is away. HM12 is not the first time Büsser’s imagination has transcended the wrist. Over the years, he has designed more than fifteen clocks with L’Epée, the historic clockmaker, creating what he describes as “crazy 3D kinetic art pieces”: flying boats, jellyfish, robots, spiders. The collaboration injected vital energy into a heritage house that had been on the precipice of bankruptcy, demonstrating that MB&F’s true medium was never merely the wristwatch. It was kinetic storytelling, engineered in three dimensions.

The new robotic piece required five years and 1,500 hand-finished components to realize, and it will be sold at a loss on every unit. The manufacturing costs escalated as the project absorbed new mechanics, design flourishes, and improbable complications. By the time the final production figures arrived, there was no elegant way to compress the deficit. Büsser recalls his team looking at him as though he required a psychological evaluation, but the financial reality did not alter the purpose of the piece. They had spent half a decade engineering something deliberately unreasonable and, to him, irresistible. It was simply, in his words, “so freaking cool.” Despite that financial defiance, MB&F’s top-tier clients, who viewed the piece under strict embargo, have already oversubscribed the limited edition three times over. Büsser views that reception as the ultimate expression of MB&F’s internal culture: “If money is the goal, you assemble a team of mercenaries. If pride is the goal, you assemble a team of missionaries. And that is what we have assembled, a team of missionaries.”

Wouldn’t It Be Cool If

Every MB&F creation begins identically. Not with an engineer, a mechanical movement, or a corporate spreadsheet. It begins with a fundamental creative provocation: wouldn’t it be cool if? For HM12, the question was whether the head of a robot could transform into a wearable timepiece. For an earlier piece, it was whether a miniature architectural dwelling could sit on the wrist, its interior rooms visible through a sapphire case, each acting as a tiny diorama of human life. Büsser recalls a Korean artist whose photographs of apartment buildings at night revealed distinct, intimate scenes in every illuminated window: arguments, affection, and ordinary human chaos. He meditated on that imagery for years before it eventually found expression in a watch.

In these foundational stages, technical engineering is intentionally barred from the room. “We still haven’t spoken to any engineer,” he notes of the initial process. The first act is pure play: sketching, exploring forms, handling 3-D prints, and allowing the object to become desirable before it is ever deemed feasible. Only then do the engineers enter. A decade ago, such radical proposals would cause technical teams to blanch. Today, after developing 23 unique calibers over two decades of collective problem-solving, that immense technical challenge has been reframed as a source of professional pleasure. Naturally, not every concept survives. Certain pieces consume thousands of hours of development before the team recognizes that the original creative spark has been compromised beyond recovery. “When you start feeling like a compromise, don’t do it,” Büsser states flatly. The objective remains the pride of creation. Everything else is secondary.

The Enlightened Dictator

Büsser cut his teeth in the traditional corporate horological world. In 1997, he was a young product manager at Jaeger-LeCoultre, recognized as the solitary voice willing to challenge executive leadership. The executive in question was Günter Blümlein, widely revered as one of the most formidable and influential figures in modern watchmaking history. During an intense debate over a product, Büsser refused to back down. His colleagues watched in silence, assuming he was on the verge of termination. Blümlein slowly lowered his spectacles. The legendary German executive delivered his next words with the absolute precision of a leader who tolerated no ambiguity: “Creativity is not a democratic process.”

Creativity is not a democratic process.

“That is one of the most important lessons of life,” Büsser reflects. “And from that, I have tried to always be an enlightened dictator. I use the word enlightened because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have this incredible group of people around me. And so, I listen, I challenge, I welcome ideas, but I take the final decision. And actually, people welcome that. Nobody wants to be with a wishy-washy leader who has no idea how to take a decision.”

This philosophy extends directly to his perception of strategic risk. He points to a text by Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon that fundamentally altered his worldview: her observation that the professional resistance one receives for a world-changing innovation is identical to the pushback received for a catastrophic idea that could bankrupt a firm. No external bellwether exists to differentiate the two. “So, the only way I can distinguish is listening to my guts and whatever my brain tells me,” he says. “Our greatest projects are those which have terrified me the most.” The projects that leave a mark on history, he continues, are those “which I was so scared, but I still had the courage to go ahead. And some of them were financial flops, but I don’t care... I realized product-wise, I have absolutely zero regrets... So, pride was the objective. Money was never the objective. So, when pride is your objective, you can never be wrong.”

The Child Who Survived

Büsser frequently references Sir Ken Robinson’s thesis that children possess innate creativity because they have not yet been conditioned to fear failure. For Büsser, this is not merely an abstract theory but a foundational operating principle, one that informs his design charrettes, his leadership style, and the counsel he offers his daughters regarding the vital importance of remaining uncorrected. “A creative adult is a human being who’s not scared of being wrong,” he asserts. That conviction defines MB&F’s design studios, where safety is viewed not as a virtue, but as a warning sign.

It also dictates his home life. He shares an anecdote regarding his eldest daughter who, at three years old, drew an organic shape resembling a potato. When asked what it represented, she confidently replied that it was a house, and he offered his full encouragement. She continued to draw these organic dwellings until formal schooling intervened; a teacher or peer corrected her, and she began drawing conventional, geometric houses. “And I told her, never forget your potato house. Never forget that potato house.” He speaks with an intensity that moves the story beyond nostalgia.

Never forget your potato house.

“I was a different kid. I had no friends. I mean, my whole MB&F has been a psychotherapy in many ways. I had a very, I thought, very lonely and lonesome and sad childhood... And I teach them being weird is cool. You will see the dividends will be hundred times when you’re an adult. You don’t get it now.” His 13-year-old daughter recently returned home wearing an entirely individualistic wardrobe. When he asked whether any of her peers dressed similarly, she replied that none did. He shares this detail with unmistakable patriarchal pride.

The Gang He Never Had

There is nothing accidental about the brand being named Maximilian Büsser & Friends, rather than Maximilian Büsser & Company. Years later, Büsser came to understand why the company could only have been called Maximilian Büsser & Friends.

“It was the whole point of creating this incredible nebula network of human beings that I basically connected, not only to me, but between each other. And to create the gang. It was the gang I didn’t have as a kid.”

It was the gang I didn’t have as a kid.

Büsser is uncompromising regarding the temperament required to enter that inner sanctum. He surrounds himself with individuals who embrace failure as a teacher, reject easy comfort, and treat radical risk as an essential component of the creative process. The most extraordinary figure in this creative ecosystem is Stephen McDonnell, whom Büsser acknowledges without reservation as the sole genius he has ever encountered. An Oxford-trained theologian from Belfast, McDonnell never stepped foot in a traditional watchmaking or engineering school; he is self-taught. That very lack of classical horological orthodoxy enables him to unravel complex mechanical puzzles that others fail to even conceptualize.

McDonnell has since engineered two calibers that Büsser characterizes as genuine revolutions in contemporary horology: a perpetual calendar and a sequential complication, each requiring between 580 and 620 entirely bespoke components. “Every time he sees something which doesn’t make any sense, his brain goes into overdrive,” Büsser notes. “He basically tries to find solutions to it.”

The Art of Slowing Down Time

Operating within a medium dedicated to measuring time, Büsser has spent three decades feeling acutely starved of it. For the past thirty years, 90 percent of his existence has been dominated by the operational labor required to protect the precious 10 percent he truly cherishes: the pure acts of creation, imagination, and mental wandering. For years, his chosen antidote was beautifully simple: spending an hour entirely alone in his Dubai garden every few days, removed from phones, screens, and corporate agendas. Just uninterrupted thought.

“You basically let your brain roam,” he says. The danger, from his perspective, is that younger generations are being conditioned to seek constant digital stimulation rather than the slower, richer rewards of physical creation. The future creative vanguard, he believes, will be composed of those who learn to derive their dopamine not from mindless scrolling, but from “creating something, doing something which is new, trying something.”

To shift that personal balance, his first New Year’s resolution in thirty years was to elevate that creative pocket of time from 10 percent to 30 percent. The mechanism facilitating this transition is a structured succession plan centered on artistic transmission rather than retirement. He originally sketched the concept for HM12 in 2020 and subsequently entrusted it to his young creative director, Maximilian Mertens, treating it as both a professional inheritance and an ultimate trial: the founder’s concept, developed as Mertens’s child. As Mertens matured the project, Büsser found himself less interested in guarding his authorship than in watching a successor’s imagination expand upon it. When Mertens presents new design iterations, Büsser notes his reaction is frequently instantaneous: “...dude, that’s incredible.”

Turning sixty this year, Büsser appears at peace with the milestone. His ego, he reflects, is no longer seeking validation. “It has been fulfilled... I have had the kudos. I have had the recognition. So, I’m not running after that.” He references Arthur Brooks’ text From Strength to Strength, which validated an evolutionary truth he was already experiencing firsthand: innovative, disruptive intelligence peaks early in life and inevitably wanes. Charles Darwin formulated his seminal theory at 28 and spent forty subsequent years frustrated by his inability to match that early brilliance. Johann Sebastian Bach, by contrast, shifted his focus from composition to mentorship, guiding his son and other nascent talents, thereby discovering a deeply fulfilled second act. Büsser readily identifies with the Bach model, noting he was already deriving immense satisfaction from fostering the creativity of others well before literature explained why.

A Morgan and a Mission

Büsser estimates that 80 to 90 percent of contemporary luxury watch purchases are driven by a desire for social status. An MB&F collector represents the antithesis of that consumer. When wearing an MB&F machine, the general public rarely recognizes the object or grasps its value. On the rare occasions onlookers discover the reality, the reaction is often incredulous: why not purchase a traditional Patek Philippe instead?

It is an experience Büsser understands intimately. Last July, he journeyed to Malvern, a small village south of Birmingham, to tour Morgan Motors, one of the world’s oldest automotive manufacturers, still operating out of the original workshop opened by Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan in 1910. “My jaw went,” he says, physically demonstrating the impact of the experience. At the Morgan facility, he observed master carpenters shaping chassis frames from raw ash wood, panel beaters hand-forming aluminum bodywork, and artisan seamstresses tailoring leather upholstery and carpets. The production methods remained almost defiantly untouched by modernity, and that was precisely where their power lay. “You guys still work like 80 years ago,” he recalls thinking during the tour. What moved him most was not nostalgia, but professional pride: the visible devotion of artisans hand-crafting an object over time. Though he had no practical need for a vehicle, Büsser was so moved by the end of the visit that he scoured the global market to secure his ideal Morgan sports car.

He sees a clear parallel with MB&F’s clientele. They are not purchasing timepieces for ostentatious display; they are drawn to the narrative, the visible touch of human hands, and the uncompromising devotion behind the object. Büsser summarizes the sentiment simply: “I need to have a piece of that story.” Morgan produces approximately 400 vehicles annually, he notes, mirroring MB&F’s own output of 400 timepieces. This commitment to kinetic storytelling is also a commitment to longevity. Büsser remains distrustful of contemporary technologies that dazzle today but risk becoming unrepairable obsolescence tomorrow. Every mechanical caliber MB&F engineers must remain fully serviceable a century from now. In a luxury landscape frequently seduced by novelty, that insistence on permanence feels quietly radical.

I need to have a piece of that story.

What Five Generations Will Say

As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Büsser what five generations from now will conclude about his legacy. Who was Max, and what did he accomplish? He treats the inquiry with seriousness, rejecting any easy or self-aggrandizing response. Perhaps, he muses, MB&F will have permanently altered the global “perception of what mechanical watchmaking could be” by establishing it firmly as “three-dimensional art, kinetic art.” Or perhaps, he notes with a wry smile, “it will be perceived as this weirdo dude who just came out with this weird stuff and it came and it went when he left and it was finished.”

A brief pause ensues. “I actually don’t know. And I don’t do it to change the world.”

He leans forward, his voice catching with quiet intensity, and returns to the deeper purpose behind MB&F.

“To inspire people to be more creative, to take more risks and to find their true north. There is no watchmaking in our why. Because everything we do is we follow our true north. We take risks all the time. We’re super creative. And if that helps people all over the world in whatever lives they have, not watchmaking, in their life, to go down those three avenues, our purpose exists.”

To inspire people to be more creative, to take more risks and to find their true north.

What lingers long after the conversation ends is the image of that 35-centimeter robotic creation: a silent guardian resting upon a desk, a mechanical marvel fastened to a wrist, and proof that it is possible, with enough stubborn conviction, to build an empire from a child’s absolute refusal to be corrected.

Editor’s note: MB&F HM12 launches June 2026. mbandf.com