You should be critical of yourselves in which sessions you attend — One of the best features Google released in gSuite at the end of 2021 for Google Calendar is called Time Insights. At a glance, I realized an uncomfortable truth: I spend far too much time in meetings and far too little time actually creating something new for my business. The number of meetings says nothing about the quality of one’s own work

Consider the demands of new generations — Opinions about Elon Musk range from adoration to contempt. For some people, he’s a visionary for others just someone who wants to make money. But it’s not quite that simple: All his companies serve to improve humanity and enable new possibilities outside the earth because that’s the only place he…

A comparison between vision and reality — We humans are known to be creatures of habit. So it’s no surprise that in the corporate context, too, we often only move when a crisis forces us to. And yet we should have known since Darwin: Only those who adapt fastest to changes and, in the best case, even…

An appeal to all who like to present a lot of information — First of all: I am an enthusiastic engineer with heart and soul. I realize that we engineers are rarely designers, but I still notice one thing about presentations: They are boring, tedious, uninspired, and raise more questions than they solve. So many bright minds sometimes create the least informative PowerPoint…

Why you should invest time on pointing out the problem not your solution. — How do you sell a car? Not via technical figures, not via beautiful pictures or texts. The best way to sell a car is through emotions. We do not buy a car every few months. Usually, we have done a lot of research in advance and already know very well…

A story about the ups and downs in our start-up — In the middle of 2014, I decided to found a startup together with friends. Six years later, in June 2020, the servers were officially shut down. After about 500k EUR turnover, invested 75k EUR, six freelancers, three external software development companies, numerous attended startup events, and a not exactly quantified…

These templates help you to generate and organize ideas — Almost everyone who is involved in starting his own business today will at some point come across the Business Model Canvas to visualize his business model. At a certain point in product development, the Value Proposition Model will be used. But why? Why do so many people and companies use…

Engineers are mostly focused on technology but they could reach more when they change the way of communication. — This week I had a very interesting workshop on the topic of “visual clarity”. What does that mean? Almost every day we are all confronted with the situation of presenting ideas, sketching processes, or visualizing elements of a conversation. But what is the best way to do that? Holger Nils…

A simple tool for visualizing the culture of a company — Some time ago, I was professionally confronted with the challenge of establishing a culture of innovation within the company. Every company states on its website to be innovative. The word “innovation” has been so exploited that I asked myself the following question: What constitutes an innovative culture? What makes it…