Complex or Complicated?
The naive and intuitive use of language sometimes mixes and overlays things that should be clearly distinguished. Popular among editors are, for example, the terms apparently and seemingly.…
Category: Leadership
Good Leadership Makes Itself Unnecessary
Leadership no longer means command and control. It is no privilege, but rather a service. And this service is to empower and enable people to lead themselves independently in…
Discipline Beyond Obedience
Children are awesome. And sometimes they are an awesome challenge. To be honest, our two daughters are this every single day – more than once. Young children in…
Man as Perpetually Wanting Animal
Successful collaboration in the age of knowledge work, especially in agile organisations with their high degree of self-organisation and self-responsibility, depends to a large extent on the assumptions about…
I have a dream!
The yearning for a new and better form of respectful and thereby profitable cooperation between people is greater than ever. Industrialization and Taylorism have transformed humans into resources. Initially…
Showing Appreciation with the Kudos Cards for the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
There’s a lot of whining and complaining. After all, it is very easy to be outraged about the mistakes made by others and especially by “those up there”. However,…
Wu Wei: Act Without Forcing
Only those who can lead themselves can lead others. This is how Father Anselm Grün sums up the essential challenge of self-leadership. Those who want to serve life…
The Workshop on the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
The Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership is on the one hand a useful stimulus for personal reflection on one’s own leadership qualities, especially in the form of the recently published…
Equal Dignity as Guiding Principle for Successful Transformations
Transformation is what everyone is talking about, because digitalization demands adaptable and customer-oriented organizations. Apparently steadfast organizational principles and behaviors that have been successful for many years must…
Independence in the Sense of the Whole
Digitalization does not replace humans and it cannot do without them. On the contrary, it is precisely because of digitalization that what is typically human is more in…
Lean Leadership: Empowering Instead of Instructing
Much can be learned from Lean Management: Understanding the value for the customer, then identifying the value stream and optimizing the flow to avoid unnecessary effort and last…
Pain of Adaptation in the Corporate World
After my switch from our small but fine start-up esc Solutions to the BMW Group IT in 2015, I was asked more than once whether I really was serious about…
Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership: The Book
A year ago, I published the six theses of the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership on this blog. The response was overwhelming. Almost 600 people have signed the Manifesto since,…
Learning Serenity from the Stoics
The year is not yet a month old and my resolutions are waste paper. I wanted to handle my time more mindfully, focus better and prioritize more effectively. Like so…
Drive Out Fear
The Roman Emperor Caligula became the epitome of the autocratic tyrant with his motto oderint, dum metuant (“let them hate, so long as they fear”). Fortunately, there aren’t…
Management by Objective – Without Carrots and Sticks
The turn of the year is traditionally the time to look back, pause and look forward to the new year. On a personal level, this typically leads to new…
How Do You Feel About Your Time?
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have more in common than their wealth. Since their first contact in 1991, the two have cultivated an intense friendship in which they…
Leading by Example
Genuine authority is not a question of rank, but of exemplary behavior, for leadership is based more on imitation than on subordination. We could save ourselves a lot of resistance,…
The Trinity of Agile Leadership
No matter what you might think of Scrum, the Scrum Guide beautifully describes three aspects of leadership in the context of agile product development. At the center of…
Dynamics of Effective Teams
Building on the success of the Oxygen project, where Google has been exploring the characteristics of good leadership, in 2012 they launched Project Aristotle, using the same data-driven…
Purpose over Profit
Many companies appear to have forgotten the very purpose of their existence. Most employees therefore answer the question about the purpose of their employer with the apparently correct…
Leadership Under Change – Equality Not Subordination
In the transition from the industrial age to the age of knowledge work, the relationship between employees and their organization changes fundamentally. Dependent workers increasingly become independent knowledge…
Three Surefire Ways to Kill Any Innovation
There are all sorts of ideas. And those who have visions should consult a physician, as Helmut Schmidt once said. After all, the most important thing is that the…
Courage – The Underestimated Virtue
For Winston Churchill it was crystal clear that without courage all other virtues would become meaningless. It is not only in society and politics that we need courage…
10 Insights from Google’s Search for Good Leadership
In 2008, a team at Google launched Project Oxygen. The aim of the project was to find out what defines good leadership and what behaviors characterize a good manager at…
Jack Welch’s Three Advices on Leadership — Purpose, Generosity and Fun
There is plenty of advice on leadership. However, few are as concise and authentic as those of Jack Welch, General Electric’s long-standing and extraordinarily successful CEO. For him,…
Three Pillars of Sustainable Change: Empathy, Trust and Patience
Change and change management was yesterday. Today we are doing transformations. A digital transformation for business models, because data is the new oil. An agile transformation for the organization…
Leadership Is About Asking Questions Instead of Giving Answers
Leadership is about making others successful. This is the leadership philosophy of Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. The founder of the drugstore chain dm, Götz W. Werner, gets…
How Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint and What to Learn from It
This is now the eighth year I’m blogging. I like writing. Writing helps me to get to the point. And by this I mean, really to the point and not…
The Art of Ambidexterity
We are experiencing a world in which it is “normal that many things are changing and are changing more quickly than ever”, as Karl-Heinz Geißler so aptly put it.…
Leadership as an Encounter of Adults on Par with Each Other
Leadership is a matter of stance. Unfortunately, leadership is still defined in terms of power and subordination. The relationship between leaders and those being led is usually asymmetrical: the…
Network and Hierarchy: The Dual Operating System of Sustainable Organizations
As a manager today, it is necessary to have more abilities than just to climb the career ladder as far as possible. The hierarchy is without question an appropriate…
Leading with Purpose and Trust
The very essence of leadership is to provide orientation. That’s why leadership is crucial in agile organizations. Agility requires orientation to be effective. Without this orientation, agility becomes…
Diversity and Dissent over Conformity and Consenus
This is the second thesis of the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership. In this second part of the explanations to the Manifesto, the concept of diversity is quite central…
Unleashing Human Potential over Employing Human Resources
Whoever sees organizations as machines and treats humans like cogwheels in them must not complain that people only work to the rule. Under these circumstances, more than working…
Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership
At a time when it is “normal that many things are changing and are changing more quickly than ever” (Karl-Heinz Geißler), the role of leadership must at least be…
Lead like a Gardener
The military is often cited as an example and blueprint for hierarchical organizations. With good reason, because in the course of industrialization, many companies were indeed inspired by…
Growth Mindset: the Key to a Learn-it-all Culture
Expertism rules. Perfection is appreciated. First time right. Mistakes must be hidden, we fail secretly. Sascha Lobo once called this a typical German fixation for gap dimensions. This was…
Only those who can lead themselves can lead others
Management deals with the inanimate. It deals with numbers, processes and structures — leadership with the living, with people in their diversity and uniqueness. It is often neglected that leadership…
Leadership is about making others successful
There are more than enough leadership philosophies. Some of them are clear and understandable, others are rather a loose series of common catchwords. Since leadership has to do with…
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